


hold my heart (between your teeth)

by mariathepenguin



Series: the weight of the world [1]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: 3x07 fix-it fic, Angst, F/F, Major Character Injury, a little gory but I think it's ok, i don't recognise canon and I won't respond to it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-05
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-03-27 12:50:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 23,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13881234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mariathepenguin/pseuds/mariathepenguin
Summary: Clarke is up and to the bed, faster than Titus, and she is turning Lexa back over with barely any regard for her bullet wound, which is still leaking black blood.“Lexa,” she gasps, and Lexa’s eyes flutter open for a second before fluttering to half mast.Her pulse is slow and weak, pulsing so weakly against her wrist that Clarke is half afraid she’s lost her again, but it’s there.Lexa lives.





	1. Chapter 1

Chapter one

 

_But Balthamos couldn't tell; he only knew that half his heart had been extinguished. He couldn't keep still: he flew up again, scouring the sky as if to seek out Baruch in this cloud or that, calling, crying, calling; and then he'd be overcome with guilt, and fly down to urge Will to hide and keep quiet, and promise to watch over him tirelessly; and then the pressure of his grief would crush him to the ground, and he'd remember every instance of kindness and courage that Baruch had ever shown, and there were thousands, and he'd forgotten none of them; and he'd cry that a nature so gracious could ever be snuffed out, and he'd soar into the skies again, casting about in every direction, reckless and wild and stricken, cursing the air, the clouds, the stars.”_

  * __Philip Pullman, the Amber Spyglass__



 

* * *

 

Lexa’s eyes close, her face alternately pale and streaked with with black blood.

The moment after stretches on, taut and painful and sharp until Clarke is gasping for air, heart beating fast and breath trapped in her chest. The truth of what has happened - the smell of blood in the air, the awful stillness of the person on the bed - gathers up and hits her her hard enough that she almost doubles over.

She cries, and can’t stop, even when Titus lifts Lexa and flips her over like she wasn’t breathing against Clarke’s lips just a minute ago, like she’s just asleep, like Clarke is not filled with a swooping horror at the sight of her body lying on the bed.

Then Titus is cutting into Lexa’s neck and she lunges forward, but he’s strong and throws her off, and black blood soaks his fingers as he reaches his fingers into the back of her neck.”

“Wait,” she says, but he doesn’t even look at her as he shoves her out of the way. She gathers the strength that she can and pushes back, and he is so busy with whatever he’s doing that he loses his balance and almost falls over. She places a hand on the back of Lexa’s neck.

Titus is easy to push out of the way, he’s so distracted by the chip, and she places her hand over the back of Lexa’s neck.

She’s so still, but goosebumps prickle against Clarke’s hand.

“Titus,” she says. Her fingers are trembling, her voice is trembling, she has never felt so weak in her life. “She’s still alive.” He doesn’t turn around. “We can-”

“The commander is dead.” His voice is flat, hands clenched around what looks like an old metal tin.

“No, I felt-”

 He moves so fast she hardly sees it, and shoves her hard. She staggers to the floor and is reaching for her knife when there is a wet, choking gasp from the bed.

 Clarke is up and to the bed, faster than Titus, and she is turning Lexa back over with barely any regard for her bullet wound, which is still leaking black blood.

 “Lexa,” she gasps, and Lexa’s eyes flutter open for a second before fluttering to half mast.

Her pulse is slow and weak, pulsing so weakly against her wrist that Clarke is half afraid she’s lost her again, but it’s there.

Titus is still standing in place, face bone white and hand trembling against where it clutches at his robes, and Clarke holds his gaze for a long moment before she opens her mouth and screams.

 

*

 

Clarke’s room isn’t all that close to Lexa’s. It’s a floor down, and private, set in a series of confusing corridors that Clarke took days to figure out. Still, her scream brings two guards - she thinks they may be part of Lexa’s detail, but she’s not sure - and they take one look at the scene - blood, and the smell of gunpowder in the air, and Heda dead or close enough to make no matter, and they charge to Clarke, spear held to her throat.

“Wait,” she says, but the spear is sharp, and the guard holding it to her throat is unrelenting, grey eyes cold.

“Titus shot Heda,” she chokes out, still as she can be, fingers still pressed to Lexa’s carotid.

The second guard turns to Titus, spear held tightly, but not quite pointing at his neck. Titus’ eyes flicker to the gun, lying a few feet away from him, shining dully in the last of the sun’s light.

His eyes dart between Clarke and the gun, over and over, and Clarke winces as the spear in her neck makes a tiny cut in her skin.

The room is deadly quiet, the guard a breath away from cutting down the Skaikru ambassador where she stands, and Titus standing still, fighting an inner battle.

He straightens up. “The Skaikru Ambassador-”

 “Titus.” Lexa’s voice is reedy, whistling past her throat and almost dying on her lips, but in the silence of the room it carries easily. Her eyes open, the glass gone, and she looks straight at Titus.

He hesitates another second and Lexa looks at him, commanding even now, a silent conversation weighted with years of history written onto every line of pain on her face. He sighs, his head bowing.

“The Skaikru Ambassador is correct,” he says, voice steady despite it all. “I did it.”

The guards move almost faster than Clarke can see, whipping their spears up to him and crowding Titus up against the far wall.

“ _Natrona_ ,” the bigger one says. His voice rasps low, scraping with anger.

“ _No frag em op_ ,” Lexa says, and her eyes close.

The guards look at each other like they are contemplating pretending that they didn’t hear her, but in the end one kicks Titus in the back of the knee and ties his arms behind his back, tight.

“Call a healer,” Clarke says. Adrenaline is still coursing through her, and her brain feels like it’s on a time lag, but one of the guard nods. 

Lexa is well and truly out now, but Clarke’s fingers haven’t moved from her pulse, and she can feel it, weak, but there.

 

*

 

Nyko runs into the room eyes blazing, followed by a harried-looking apprentice. He barely spares Clarke a glance before speaking to the apprentice in quick Trigedasleng. The apprentice nods and leaves the room in a hurry, and he turns to Clarke.

“Tell me what happened,” he says, and he works as she speaks, cutting the clothing off around the wound and wincing at the damage. The entry wound is small and neat, but the bullet punched out of Lexa’s back right next to her spine and it’s left a small crater of ruined tissue.

Nyko is efficient even without his helper, and he props Lexa on her side and cleans out the front while Clarke keeps pressure on the back.

When the apprentice comes back he spreads strips of linen cloth over a table in the corner and smells an bitter-smelling powder over it. Clarke’s nose wrinkles, but Nyko nods approvingly.

Between the two of them, they apply enough pressure to stop the bleeding, and, and when the apprentice comes back he helps too, dipping linen cloth into hot water and adding handfuls of a brown root to the water. It smells horrible, but Nyko nods appreciatively. The apprentice hands him a bone needle threaded with what looks like catgut, and Clarke watches, heart in her throat, as Nyko quickly sews up the wounds. Lexa doesn’t even stir, and Clarke keeps two fingers carefully pressed over her throat.

And then it’s over, and Lexa is still breathing.

“Some veins are damaged,” Nyko says. “If the tissue starts to die we will have to operate ourselves.” Clarke can only nod, she’s so numb, but he seems satisfied with that response.

 “I will wait here, for a while,” he says, and Clarke nods even though it’s evident that he was stating a point, not asking. The apprentice sits down too, quiet, eyes fixed on Lexa’s face, and they settle in to wait.

 

*

 

The knock on the door startles them all, Clarke from her spot next to the bed, and Nyko and the apprentice on the couch in the corner. It sounds again, louder, and Clarke hesitates until she remembers that there are guards stationed outside Lexa’s room.

Octavia pushes past her as soon as she opens the door.

“I heard,” she says. “How bad is it?”

Bad enough that all she can do is be grateful that Lexa’s breathing. Some of that must show on her face, because Octavia’s loses some of its severity.

“I heard it was Titus,” she says. Nyko and the apprentice are awake already, and Clarke steers Octavia into the alcove where her washbasin is.

“Yes,” she says, when they have a modicum of privacy. “Listen-”

“You’re not coming,” Octavia says, kinder than she expected. Clarke lets out a breath.

“I can’t,” she says.  She doesn’t think her feet would carry her out of the tower if she tried. 

“You’re an idiot,” Octavia says. “They’ll kill you if you stay on this side.”

“Lexa said -” and it seems so long ago, that sunlit afternoon, Lexa looking at her, face open with hope that Clarke had felt down to her marrow - “Lexa said I can choose to stay on this side of the kill order. That’s what I’m going to do.”

Octavia seems to fight with herself for a second before she deflates. “You’re an idiot,” she says. “I have to go.”

“How will you get out?” The sun set a while ago, and as fierce as Octavia is, Clarke doesn’t like her odds against a city full of warriors.

“Indra said she’d help,” she says. She takes her pack off her bag and leans it on the edge of the washbasin, fishing around until she pulls out a handheld radio. 

“One of Raven’s,” she says. “I have the other one. She did something to them, doubled their range, but that only brings it to around fifty miles.”

Clarke grips the radio hard, the cool plastic soothing against her overwarm skin. “Thank you.”

Octavia strides to the door, steps sure, barely throwing a glance in Lexa’s direction. She turns at the door and holds her arm out, and Clarke grasps it tight. Octavia squeezes once and lets go.

“Hope this works out for you,” she says, and she slips out of the door.

Nyko and the apprentice are awake now, not even pretending that they weren’t listening. Clarke tucks the radio into her packs, still leaning ready against her bags, and doesn’t meet their eyes.

 

*

 

Nyko leaves Lexa’s chambers the next day.

“She is healing,” he says. “We need to let her rest.”

He leaves his apprentice, though, and comes back at least three times that afternoon.

Clarke only leaves that evening when she is almost delirious with exhaustion. Lexa’s still sleeping and she’s seemed stable. Nyko had said that Nightbloods recover faster than most and so far he seems to be right.

She doesn’t go far, only to a spare room where someone has set up a basin full of clean water and a fresh set of clothes. It can’t be more than twenty minutes, but she stumbles back into Lexa’s room like she’s been gone for days, half expecting to find a still, pale body.

The only thing that’s changed is Lexa’s eyes flutter open when Clarke reaches for her hand, hazy with pain but trying to focus anyway. Clarke moves closer so that she fills Lexa’s field of vision.

Lexa’s eyes land on hers, skimming down her face like it’s been years since she last saw it. Clarke can see that Lexa wants to speak, to try to fight against the drugs still coursing through her system but she loses the battle rapidly. Fingers twitch against her own as Lexa’s eyes fall closed again, and Clarke sits down, relief pressing her down so mercilessly that she struggles not to drop her head to the bedspread and cry.

 

*

 

She remembers Lexa’s neck wound when the apprentice steps out of the room. It’s clotted and surprisingly neat looking, covered neatly by Lexa’s hair. Lexa doesn’t even stir as she cleans it.

 

*

 

On the third day after Lexa was shot, Clarke is summoned to a meeting with the clans. The man who comes to summon her is dressed like Titus, in flowing robes and a shaved head, and she represses a reflexive shiver of dislike.

“The Ambassadors are gathering,” he says. “Your presence is requested, as a _Skaikru_ leader.”

She doesn’t want to go. Leaving this room is the last thing she wants to do. But she has no business being on this side of the line, and while she is, she has a duty to her people.

“How long?” she says.

 

*

 

She only just makes it in time.

Lexa has been awake, but groggy when she had left, and she left Nyko’s apprentice

(Karos. It had taken too long for her to ask his name)

With detailed instructions. He had given her a patient look, like she wasn’t saying anything that Nyko hadn’t already told her, but nodded in agreement anyway.

She had washed and dressed as soon as she could, but she is still the last person to walk into the assembly. All of the ambassadors stop and stare as one as she takes the only empty seat, but she doesn’t apologise, and the man at the head of the table in the seat that is usually Lexa’s speaks.

“We welcome Klark of _Skaikru_ to the enclave,” he says, in precise english, like Lexa’s. “I am Umar. I will represent Trikru until such time that Heda has recovered from her wounds.”

“May it be sooner rather than later,” the woman opposite Clarke says.

“Of course,” says the man to Clarke’s right. He turns to her and smiles, white teeth set in a bristling beard. “I am Kytos, of the Rock Line Clan. We have not met.” She gives him a terse nod.

“ _Hei_ ,” she says. The woman to her left snorts.

“No time for pleasantries, Kytos,” she says. She’s thin, and tall, a blue tattoo of a leaping fish on her neck. “We are here to discuss the future of the Coalition.”

“Dramatics will not help us, Illiana.” The man who speaks is on the far side of the table, raspy-voiced, thick lines of black drawn down his arms and hands in a geometric design that Clarke would find fascinating, at any other time. “We do not have much time to reach an accord. Let us not waste it.”

The woman with the fish tattoo - Illiana - scowls. “I am not trying to waste time, Jael. I am trying to do the opposite.” But he only chuckles.

Clarke’s head is spinning already. She had met all these people weeks ago, when she first swore fealty, but she hadn’t spent as much time as she should getting to know them. It’s starting to feel like a monumental mistake now. She can feel the tensions and alliances in the room, see the sidelong glances that they shoot at each other with every sentence that’s spoken.

“Heda is healing well, I hear,” Umar says, and for all their bickering, they fall silent, a mention of Lexa enough to quell them even now. “The healer informs me that she is expected to make a full recovery.”

“And does your healer know when that may be?” Illiana is leaning forward, hands steepled on the table, eyebrows drawn together. “I wish for her quick recovery, as I’m sure we all do, but there are important decisions to be made, and the Lake People cannot wait. We have trade routes to solidify. The bandits in the Western Forests are carrying off livestock. There is a famine affecting the Southern Clans as we speak. All of which cannot be dealt with without the full accord of Heda, as per her own Coalition rules.”

“I will speak for her,” Umar says. “I am an adviser in the Trikru Councils and I know her mind and policies well.”

“Your expertise is highly sought and regarded,” says the man sitting next to him. He is small and slight, skin a dark brown and eyes a startling amber. “I know you, Umar. I know you are wise. But you did not build the Coalition.”

“Heda built the Coalition,” Clarke says, finally finding her voice. “It will not crumble because she needs some time to recover.”

“It may be so,” the man says, “ but there are decisions to be made. Your clan is threatening a way of life that we have only begun to learn. If we are going to respond to this threat, we must act soon, and together.”

“It almost sounds as if you are threatening my people, Ambassador,” she says. Her voice is calm, posture relaxed, but the beginnings of anger thrums in her chest.

“Your people threaten themselves,” he says. “Violence is not the first tool I reach for, myself. But we need a strong voice if the Coalition is going to continue.”

Clarke does her best to swallow her anger. “What do you suggest, then?”

“A regent,” Illiana says. “Not a representative -” and the look she throws Umar falls just short of contempt. “A leader. A voice to carry us through the weeks until Heda is well again.”

“And who would this leader be?” Kyrion is frowning now, the camaraderie gone from his face.

Illiana smiles.

“One of us, of course,” and Clarke feels her heart sink, even as the room explodes into noise.

 

*

 

“You did well.” The man with the light brown eyes sidles up to her as she makes for the door, and she unwillingly falls into step as they leave the assembly room. “It’s not easy to be a newcomer.”

The meeting had only gone downhill after Illiana’s suggestion, and an embattled Umar called an end shortly after. Nothing had come of Illiana’s suggestion after all. Nothing, except for a creeping feeling that something dangerous had been set in motion.

“Thank you, Ambassador,” Clarke says, partly out of politeness and partly because she doesn’t want him to know that she doesn’t remember his name.

“Please, call me Terren,” he says, with a look that tells her that he knows what he’s doing. “Of the Glowing Forest Clan.”

She wants to go. She hates smug diplomacy, hates scheming and scrapping for every small bit of influence. But that’s the game she has to play if she’s going to do this right.

“I was an early supporter of the Coalition,” Terren says. “The Glowing Forest Clan are not warlike. Our crop yields are poor and we rely heavily on trade. It was not a difficult decision, when Heda Lexa presented it to us. And for the most part, we have benefitted. We have stability.”

They come to a corner, and Terren stops. He’s chosen well, angled so he can see anyone coming from both directions. 

“Most Clans are like us,” he says, “We want peace, neighbours who only come to their territory when invited. There are a few among us who want power and conquest. But offer peace, and we will not sway.”

The hallway is still empty, and Clarke has a sudden vision of Terren pulling out a knife and drawing it across her throat in this deserted space, her lifeblood spilling out as he walks away.

“Why are you telling me this?” she says.

“I do not like Illiana,” he replies. “I don’t trust her.”

“And you trust me?”

“No” he says. “But I know that you want your people safe. And it is clear that Illiana will not offer that. _Jus drein nou jus daun_ is not her saying, after all.” He bows, not entirely sincerely, and is gone, and Clarke is left alone in the still-empty corridor.

 

*

 

Lexa is awake when Clarke makes her way back to her bedchambers, eyes heavy-lidded and mostly propped up by pillows. She looks exhausted already, dark circles under her eyes and her breath shallow and rapid. Clarke crosses the room quickly and sits next to her.

“You’re awake,” she says, and brushes sweaty hair from Lexa’s temple. Lexa leans into the, a barely-there movement that still warms Clarke’s chest.

“Barely,” Lexa says. “How bad was it?”

“Pretty bad,” Clarke says, tone deliberately light. “Nyko got to you in time. You’re going to be fine.” her eyes travel down the the section of the blanket that covers Lexa’s wound, all of that devastation neatly wrapped and tucked away.

“Nyko says that I can’t leave my bed for weeks,” Lexa says, a small frown painted over her face. “That can’t be right.”

“It sounds right to me,” Clarke says, hand still touching the warm skin of Lexa’s cheek, cheekbone sharp against her palm.

“We’ll see,” Lexa says, and slips into sleep almost in the next moment. Clarke pulls her hand away and takes some of the pillows, laying Lexa out flat and tucking her against the blankets.

Whatever it is that Nyko had given her makes her sleep in a in a different way than Clarke is used to. She is used to Lexa shifting and waking at every small move that Clarke makes. When they were planning the attack on Mount Weather Lexa would catnap and Clarke would pace, and turn to see green eyes watching her, no impatience for the stranger who treated Heda’s tent as if was her own, and -

A knock on the door startles her out of her remembering. Her hand had slid down to Lexa’s chest without her realising, pressed to her sternum and feeling the beat of her heart, strong and steady. 

“Enter,” she says, and Indra walks in.

“Nyko says she is healing well,” Indra says, eyes landing on the unconscious Heda in the bed. “I had hoped to find her awake.”

“She just fell asleep,” Clarke says. “I can pass on a message, or have someone find you when she wakes up again. 

“Thank you,” Indra says. She looks away from Lexa and focuses on Clarke instead. Her gaze is direct enough to make Clarke want to look away.

“I hope you found the Ambassadors’ assembly useful,” she says, voice bland, but her eyes haven’t lost that laser focus.

“I wouldn’t say that. Restless, maybe,” she says. Indra nods, quiet, giving nothing away. Lexa had always seemed to trust Indra, and so Clarke decides to take a leap. She can’t do this alone. She doesn’t know these people, and something tells her that she doesn’t have the time to try.

“I think they’re going to try to take the throne from Le - Heda,” she says. There is no surprise on Indra’s face, only acceptance and anger. 

“That’s what I fear also,” she says. Clarke takes an involuntary step forward.

“What do you know?”

Indra gives her a considering look, before she looks back at Lexa, still asleep on the bed. Her mouth thins in worry before she steps away.

“Let me know when Heda is awake,” she says, and leaves.

 

*

 

She knows something is wrong when one of Lexa’s scribes comes to her room to tell her that the Ice Nation Ambassador has left Polis.

She doesn’t want to leave. It’s only been a week since Lexa was shot, and she’s running a fever, her healing wound is hot and tender around the edges, but she’s lasted this far by listening to her instincts, and she takes the offering that the scribe offers her.

The room that he leads her to isn’t far from the throne room, and one glance tells her that everyone in it is Woods Clan. 

“The Ice Nation is planning a coup,” someone says. He looks vaguely familiar. Clarke thinks she remembers him from that first disastrous meeting that had ended with Gustus dead and Raven tied to a pole.

“There are Ice Nation scouts posted at the perimeter of Polis. They are dressed as travellers from the Broadleaf Clan, but one of my men recognised one of the scouts from a trading post.” It’s clear from the way that no one else reacts to this that the news is being repeated for Clarke’s benefit, and she does her best to digest this and move past it.

“They’re going to take over,” she says. The Lexa stand-in - Umar, is there too, watching soberly from a corner.  

“Sooner rather than later,” he says. “We hear that Heda is still unwell. And there are no secrets in a place like this.”

“We have to stop them,” she says, aware she is speaking the obvious, but her mind seems to be caught in the same orbit, spinning uselessly around the information like something new will come of it. Umar nods. 

“We are assembling the garrison,” he says. “The generals are readying their troops in the surrounding villages. They will not get far into this territory.”

“There has to be more we can do,” Clarke says.

“There is,” says Umar. “The Ambassadors. Even the Ice Nation cannot stand against us divided.”

She thinks of the group of people who had sat in that room, the sly asides and the barbs that she recognised half a second after everyone else. She thinks about the carefully arranged seating that drew clear lines of power across the table. And against all odds, she laughs. 

“They had no idea,” she says, “ what they were doing when they sent us down here.” They stare at her, bemused and faintly disapproving.

“How do you want to do this?”

 

*

 

It all unravels very quickly after that.

Lexa is burning when she returns to her room, skin flushed and breath rapid. Nyko is already there, fingers pressed to her neck. He notices and dismissed Clarke in almost the same second, and turns back to Lexa.

“The wound is badly infected,” he says. “It may already be in the blood.”

Clarke reaches forward and pulls the blanket back. The flesh around the wound is red and hot to the touch, skin straining against Nyko’s careful stitches.

“Shit,” she mutters. 

“Clarke,” Lexa says. Her lips are dry and chapped, her voice hoarse. She pushes at Nyko’s hands and he moves back, standing at a respectful distance as Lexa locks her hands over Clarke’s wrist. Her grip is as strong as ever, and Clarke bites back a wince.  “Umar came to me. He told me what is happening. You have to leave.”

“No,” Clarke says, the word coming out smooth and easy despite everything.

“They will not harm me.”

“You’re a terrible liar,” Clarke says. “Really, you are.” Lexa closes her eyes.

“Not again,” she says. “Clarke, please, don’t make me do this again." 

Lexa has fought men almost twice her size on the battlefield, and has been shot in the stomach and sewn back together using tools that Ark doctors would never touch, but it’s seeing Lexa like this, heedless of Nyko standing a few feet away, unarmed, skin damp with fever, that nearly breaks her.

 “I’m not leaving without you,” Clarke says, and Lexa turns her face away, into the pillow, but Clarke can see the tears sliding down her cheeks, silent and devastating.

 

*

 

Indra comes to see her soon after. Lexa is asleep, carried away by a combination of the fever and exhaustion from the wound. Clarke is watching over her, still, hand in hers, doing her best to think her way out of a corner.

“There’s another assembly tomorrow,” Clarke says.

“Good.” Indra is quiet. “We have to get her out.” Clarke nods.

“I have an idea,” she says, and it’s a mark of how far they’ve come that Indra only leans closer, dark eyes on hers.

 

*

 

She’s always the last one to every Grounder meeting, it seems. But this time when she arrives in the assembly room the bored man - Jael, of the Shadow Walker Clan - stands and bows deeply.

“Welcome,” he says, the sincerity in his voice balanced oddly against his ridiculous bow. The Ice Nation Ambassador is back, sitting quiet.

There’s what feels like an hour of idle chat, discussions on tariffs and tax, before Illiana speaks.

“Enough,” she says. “I move that you elect me regent, until Heda is well.” There’s no surprise this time, only some discontented muttering.

“There’s no precedent for such a thing,” Umar says.

“The Coalition is three summers old,” Illiana returns. “There is no precedent for most things.”

“I will not be voting for you, Illiana,” Jael says. “The Shadow Walkers are not disloyal. We swore fealty to Heda, and by all reports she is still alive.”

“For which we thank the spirit,” Illiana says smoothly. “This is not a permanent position. Umar - for all of your wisdom,” she says, turning to him. “You are an advisor. You were never meant to lead. There is no shame in sharing your burden.”

That was an overstep, Clarke can see, as some of the other Ambassadors shift at her condescension. Illiana recovers quickly.

“I only ask for a chance to prove myself to you,” she says, and Clarke has had enough.

“It’s been one week,” Clarke says. “The Coalition can survive a little longer without Heda, can’t it?”

“Leadership must be continuous,” Illiana says, “and the line has been broken. Heda too weak to rule, and her mentor in chains for almost causing her death.” Everyone is sitting, no one is speaking louder than normal, but Illiana seems to be looming over her, her voice boring into her ears. “Our faith in her leadership wavered once before,” Illiana continues, “and she has recovered. Do you not believe that she can recover from this?”

Clarke waves aside that barbed question, nearly hitting Kytos in the face with her hand. “She fights for you,” Clarke says. “She accepted your oaths of fealty, and has come to your aid whenever you’ve called. All of you,” and she can’t help but sneak a look at the Ice Nation Ambassador. “You can sit here in this room, together, because of _her_.”

 “And so it is of great importance that we continue to act as a Coalition. Support each other in time of need.” The Ice Nation Ambassador, distinctive white tattoos standing out in his face, speaks for the first time that Clarke has heard, and out of the corner of her eye, she sees a few heads nodding.

“This is not support,” Clarke says, and she’s standing, when did that happen - and her knuckled are buried in the gnarled wood of the table.

“You know nothing of rule,” he says, eyes calm. “You are not one of us. You are not of this place. We make allowances for you. We speak your killer’s language so you can join in our meetings - but this is not truly your decision to make." 

He speaks with the authority of someone who is used to respect, who was raised in Nia’s shadow, but Clarke refuses to let him cow her.

“I have as much right to be here as anyone,” she says. “Every Clan here has caused hurt. This Coalition is about more than that. If we start to scramble for power as soon as we think we smell weakness, we’re no better off than we were before.”

Illiana shakes the head, and the arguments continue. By the time Umar calls for a vote, Clarke’s throat is tired, and her throat is dry from speaking.

“I vote for myself, Illiana of the Lake People, as Regent.”

“I, Dyar of Azgeda, second the vote.” the Ice Nation Ambassador says.

“Eston of the Plains Riders, supports the vote,” says a burly man, and Clarke feels a frisson of fear. The Delphi Clan will be sandwiched in between two aggressors if they vote against Illiana. If they vote for her, only the Desert Clan will stand for Lexa. And they are scattered and small, easily cut off from the rest of the Coalition. 

The final vote stands at seven for Illiana, and six against.

Illiana does a good job of hiding her elation, but the Ice Nation Ambassador does an even better one. It make it sting more, somehow.

Umar bows deeply, and tells Illiana that he will make the required arrangements, and everyone stands to leave, as if that was a prearranged signal. Even the ones who voted for Illiana are quick to leave, heads bowed as though they are leaving behind something vaguely shameful. Clarke is on her way out when Terren holds her elbow.

“Go,” he says quietly. “Do not pass by your room. Get out, now.” And he pats her arm gently, as if he is only consoling her over her defeat.

*

 

Clarke runs. 

The halls whip by her in a blur of brown, and she throws herself down winding stairs, disused and uneven because she doesn’t want to be seen on the main routes in and out of the tower. She wants to go to her room, wants to check, but her legs carry her down and down and down until the air is damp and cold, and the drip of water sounds in the dim light.

She stumbles in the dark, until a rough hand reaches out of the dark and grabs her. She stifles a scream as she sees that it is one of Lexa’s personal guards, the one that Indra had told her to look out for.

“This way,” he says, when she has stopped trembling, and he leads her deeper into the base of the tower, until all of the sounds from above are drowned out, and all there is to listen to is the sound of their footsteps.

“Here,” he says, and moves aside to reveal Lexa wrapped in a bedroll, shivering, surrounded by another guard and Indra, who looks grimly pleased to see her.

“Well,” she says. 

“It failed,” Clarke says. Indra shakes her head.

“They are fools. Still, we had enough time to get out. Barely,” Indra adds.

Lexa is unconscious, but Clarke allows herself the luxury of sweeping her hair away from her face, just for a second. 

“We should go,” she says, turning, and Indra nods.

The guard picks Lexa up, looking half terrified at the thought of Heda limp in his arms, and they set off at a steady run, Indra’s steady footsteps leading them on.

 

*

 

It was midday when Clarke had entered the Ambassadors’ meeting and it’s night now. Clarke shivers as the water from the underground river they had waded through seeps through her clothes.

“You’ll go on alone from here, Sky Girl,” Indra says. “I’ll be missed. Yehad -” she turns to one of the guard and changes to a stream of Trigedasleng too fast and low for Clarke to follow. She turns back to Clarke.

“There is a woman on the outskirts of Polis. She will look after her. You will stay?” Clarke nods. Indra holds out an arm, clasps Clarke tightly, and is gone.

Yehad creates a hollowed-out area in the wagon for them to crawl into, Lexa, still unconscious, is laid down carefully, and Clarke follows after. He squeezes himself at their feet. The other guard covers them with a tarp, and they are off with a bump.

Lexa is prone next to her, breathing in short, sharp bursts that sound as if she’s been running. Clarke places a hand over her sternum to feel her heart, and she settles in for the ride.

 

*

 

They lay in the wagon for what feels like an hour, Lexa in front of her and Clarke pressed tightly behind, and she listens to the sound of life going on all around them. They cringe together when they hear the telltale sound of Trikru warriors marching past, and Clarke’s mouth waters as they pass the market and the smell of the sweet, flattened bread that Clarke likes so much wafts toward them.

Lexa is still beside her, breathing onto her neck and fidgeting occasionally, and Clarke closes her eyes and imagines that her hand is on Lexa’s chest because they’re still in her room in the tower, and maybe -

There’s not time for that, because the wagon is bumping to a stop and the tarp is pushed out of the way. Splashes of pink appear on the rooftops and dapple on the ground as the sun begins to rise, and Clarke instinctively tucks her feet in, afraid of being seen.

“Out,” Yehad says, and Clark obeys, wiggling out awkwardly. They are standing in the mouth of a narrow alley, and there is no one to be seen. Yehad clambers in and gets Lexa out in an awkward cradle hold.

“In there,” Yehad says, and he strides to the end of the alley and kicks aside what looks like a pile of firewood and walks through what looks like solid wall.

Yehad sticks his head out. “ _Wanheda_. This way.” and Clarke heads toward the place where Yehad is waiting. There is a brick-coloured door set into the wall, behind the firewood.

The door leads to a low room that connects to what looks like a common eating area. Lexa is spread out on the table, and Yehad takes his leave as soon as Clarke starts to walk in.

“This is Kilari,” he says. “She is a healer. I must go.”

Kilari is a lean woman, about her mother’s age, with tattoos covering the skin of her arms. She is dressed in a leather jerkin and grey trousers, and a plain band holds a neat braids  away from her face. She nods at Clarke.

“Heda is not well. He tells me that you know how to heal,” she says, in heavily accented English.

“Yes,” Clarke says, and just like that, she is energised.

“Good,” Kilari says, and they set to work.

 

*

 

First, they cut away Lexa’s clothing. It’s mostly useless anyway, since her wound is bleeding again, jostled from all the movement. Next, Clarke uses a clean rag to keep pressure on the wound while Kilari takes the old stitches out. When she’s done, they both wince.

It’s badly infected, skin red and starting to turn black around the edges, pus showing at the exit wound. When Kilari sees that, her lips thin. She carefully undoes the stitches on the exit wound while Clarke keeps Lexa balanced on her side.

“Move your hands,” Kilari says, and when she does, there is only a small gush of blood. Kilari looks grimly relieved.

“We have to clean the wound out,” Clark says. “And close the wounds. I can do it.”

Kilari shoots her a half incredulous, half amused glance. “Very well.”

Kilari brings her a murky solution in a bowl, and Clarke looks at it suspiciously. “What is that?”

“Water, and salt, and - “she pauses, searching for the word. “It’s a plant. I will show you later.” Clarke debates the wisdom of asking for more information, but they don’t really have time for that.

They wash the wound carefully, Clarke pouring while Kilari makes sure that it washes in, mixing with the blood and infection. They use two bowls of it, and the third time they use plain water.

They examine the wound again, Clarke zeroing in on the black tissue at the edges of the bullet wound. Kilari looks at her, and pulls out a small knife. She dips it into the cloudy mix, over and over, until it gleams.

Clarke swallows. She’s never done a debridement before, only watched, and that was a burn on an engineer’s arm. This is aeons away from that. But she knows the basic medicine behind it. Cut away the old and allow the wound to heal.

“You can wait in the other room if you wish,” Kilari says.

“I’ll stay,” Clarke says, and hopes that Lexa will stay unconscious.

 

*

 

“ _No mou_ ,” Lexa chokes. “ _No mou. Beja._ ”

Her hands scramble at Clarke’s wrist, but her strength is gone and Kilari pins her easily. The knife digs into the wound, digging out the dying flesh, and Lexa screams, the thin, hopeless sound of a dying animal.

Lexa had woken up quickly, jerking so hard that a new gush of blood had flowed out of her wound. Kilari’s barely been able to move forward, and she doesn’t see how they are going to get to the end like this. 

“Almost done,” she says, in her mother’s detached doctor voice. But Lexa’s blood has made everything slippery and Kilari struggling is not to cut away healthy tissue. “Can you try more of that powder?” Kilari shakes her head.

“I don’t have anything that will work effectively on a _Natblida_.” Kilari cuts again, and Lexa’s eyes roll back in her head. She can feel herself sweating, and her stomach is churning.

Lexa screams, and Kilari clamps a hand over her mouth. “Heda, you are going to get us killed. Please.” Lexa’s eyes are wide, searching, landing on Clarke and bouncing off as if she has no idea who she is, and a selfish part of Clarke is happy because she doesn’t want Lexa to associate this hell with her, but she can see that her eyes are glazed and she is delirious with pain, and maybe… she presses a hand to Lexa’s cheek.

“Lexa,” she says. “Can you hear me?” Kilari pulls her hand from Lexa’s mouth.

There is a harsh silence, filled only with Lexa’s panting, before she answers.

“Yes,” she rasps. Clarke manages a wobbly smile. Lexa’s eyes are still unfocused, and so Clarke lowers her face until they are cheek to cheek, her mouth at Lexa’s ear.

“I know it hurts,” she says quietly. “I am so sorry. I know it hurts. But I need you to keep still. You need to keep still and quiet, or they’re going to find us. Please, Lexa.” And it’s low, she knows it is, but Lexa lets out a breath than sounds like a groan and bites into her bottom lip.

Clarke leans over her again, and feels a hand tangle into the bottom of her shirt, fingers brushing her skin.

“Okay,” she says, and they carry on.

 

*

 

By the end of it, they are both trembling. Lexa didn’t pass out like Clarke had hoped, and she shivers as Clarke lifts a skin of water to her throat and urges her to drink. Lexa does, messily, and they tuck her underneath a blanket to rest.

 Kilari lingers, and presses a hand to Lexa’s shoulder. “ _Ogud, Heda_ ,” she says, and Lexa’s eyes flutter shut.

 

*

 

Kilari beckons Clarke into an alcove, next to what looks like a bedroom.

“She must rest. We will leave her be for a few hours. But they will look for her.”

She shakes her head, forestalling the next question. “I will hide you.”

“Why?” Clarke asks. 

“I used to work in the tower as a tutor,” Kilari says. “She came to us very young. I found her in the courtyard, barely walking and palm cut to show her blood.” She pushes a loose braid from her head and smiles. “We were not meant to form attachments. But we are only human.”

 

*

 

Kilari shows her a false wall behind the fireplace that leads to a series of steep stairs. At the bottom is a space that can hardly be called a room. It is dank and small, the only light from the candle that Clarke is holding. It gives the room a sickly yellow light that has Clarke chasing shadows with her eyes.

There is a pallet in the corner, and they spend the better part of an hour making it up. They put Lexa on a blanket and carefully drag it towards the chimney, struggling to lift it down the stairs so that they don’t bump her.

Finally, it’s done, and Kilari leaves them.

“I’ll leave the door open,” she says, “and close it if there’s trouble.”

And then they are alone, for the first time in what feels like days.

The candle gutters, and she closes her eyes, cuddles closer to Lexa, not quite touching. She is desperately tired, but her eyes will not close. She traces the shape of Lexa’s bow lips, twice, watching the uneven shadows that their candle throws across the room.

“ _Reshop, Heda_ ,” she says, and for a moment, the unsteady light of the candle lets her believe that Lexa’s lips are moving, wishing her well.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter two**

 

_we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river._  

  * __Love letter from Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, 1927__



 

* * *

 

Two days, and her eyes have become so sensitive. She winces when Kilari opens the hatch to pass down supplies.

“Have faith,” Kilari says, which is such an Un-Grounder-like thing to say that Clarke freezes mid crouch, clutching the herbs to her chest. Kilari has made a poultice of what smells like garlic and some kind of oil, and Clarke carefully layers it onto the bandages before laying them aside, ready for changing. Kilari smiles down at her and she wonders how she must look, filthy again, cringing from the sun like a burrowing animal. She turns away.

*

Kilari tells her that the guards are offering a reward for anyone who has information on Lexa’s whereabouts. Dead or alive.

“They claim that Heda has been taken by rebels,” Kilari says. She looks as if she wants to say more, but after a long moment, just shakes her head.

“We’ll keep the door closed,” she says instead.

*

The wagon that had brought them to Kilari’s house hadn’t gone all that far from the Tower. It had doubled back on itself and taken the back routes while they huddled in the back. Homes are searched from the Tower going out, and they come to Kilari’s house four days after they fled.

There is some kind of passage that allows for ventilation, and it never becomes unbearable, but the air quickly grows stale and muggy. Lexa wakes at the sound of the stomping feet above them, and they lay together, candle blown out just in case, waiting for the beam of light that means their hiding place has been discovered.

It goes on for days, silence, before the sounds from above that tell her the house is being searched again, and Kilari takes to leaving the false wall closed. Lexa drifts in and out of consciousness, barely alert even when she is awake.

And Clarke has spent so many years of her life locked away, contained, that the thought of keeping on like this makes her want to scream.

*

One day seven, or maybe eight, Lexa gets worse. Her wound turns an ugly purple that covers the right side of her stomach and some of her back.

She shakes uncontrollably, then burns, and Clarke lays down next to her and presses a wet cloth to her head. She spoons weak broth past her lips and watches the tremors under her eyelids.

For the first time Lexa seems to be completely out of her reach, away from the influence of her patchy medical knowledge and pilfered herbs. Clarke watches in terror as her breath grows shallow and her fever soars ever higher.

She presses her forehead against Lexa’s. The skin burns.

“Please,” she says, and it is so unfair to put more on this woman who has given her so much, but Lexa is slipping from her fingers by degrees and she doesn’t know what else to do.

It’s selfish, so selfish to hold her like this when she had promised her that her fight was over. Lexa’s lips are dry and chapped and the smell of death has started to leak from her pores, but Clarke presses forward and keeps their lips together for a few counts of her racing heart.

“Lexa,” she says, and she feels split open, raw in front of this woman who will most likely never open her eyes again. “You promised me, you promised to protect your people. You promised you wouldn’t leave me again.”

She paints Lexa’s face with her tears until she is worn out, and still Lexa grows weaker.

_Yu gonplei nou ste odon_ , Clarke thinks, or hopes, or prays.

*

Kilari comes with her medical kit. “It is infected again.”

Clarke’s pretty sure that that was had happened too, but she’s feeling a little fragmented and only nods.

“We won’t move her upstairs,” Kilari says. “It is still not safe. We will light candles down here.” And it’s probably more a statement of how far Clarke’s gone, but after they light them all, her first thought is that Lexa would love it.

Lexa stays asleep, thanks to the herb that Kilari fetched from the market a few days ago. It’s pungent and leaves the tips of her fingers tingling where she touches it, but it works. Clarke’s eyes are used to dim light, now, and she does most of it, Kilari watching her sharply until it’s over.

“Done,’ she says. Kilari pats her hand.

“Natblidas are strong,” she says. “I do not think that her spirit is going any time soon.”

*

Her fever breaks in the night. Clarke feels the shiver and sudden coolness of Lexa’s skin from where she has an arm thrown over her.

*

Lexa bleeds black, and the room bleeds darkness into every corner, and Clarke is tired.

Lexa’s breath rasps like bare skin on stone, an in-out that has Clarke alternately on edge and sick with relief, timing the breaths in between her own. She holds the candle to Lexa’s neck to watch the blood in her carotid push against the skin.

The room is so small.

*

 

Sometime around the ninth day, Lexa chokes awake, a hoarse scream leaving her body. Her hands scrabble to her stomach, shoving the blanket away to press a hand over her bandages.

They stay in a frozen moment, Lexa pressing her hand over her wound, Clarke hovering, faces close.

(Everything, too close)

“I thought it was a dream.” Lexa’s voice is cracked from disuse, and weak, but there is nothing else to listen to in this room.

“What part?” She holds the wrist of her free hand, and Lexa flips her palm so that Clarke can lace their fingers. Her hair is greasy and matted, and Clarke can feel grime coating most every inch of her skin.

Lexa’s eyes close. “Living.” Her fingers tighten around Clarke’s. “Clarke,” she breathes, “it hurts,” and Clarke lowers her face to Lexa’s shoulder. She smells like sick and sweat and something earthy. But Clarke doesn’t smell so hot right now either. She buries a free hand in her hair.

“It hurts, because you’re alive. And you’re gonna stay that way.” She sounds harsher than she wanted to, but she can almost feel Lexa’s soul trying to escape her body, and she presses down as if to hold it in.

Lexa barks out a laugh. It’s dry and tired, but it’s there.

*

 

She dreams that Lexa stands above her, riddled with bullet holes. White bone gleams from the holes in her flash.

Clarke tries to go to her, and  Lexa shoves her aside easily. She plants her sword in the ground, point up.

I’m doing this for you, Clarke whispers.

You lie, Lexa says. You’re doing it for you.

And she falls.

*

 

And it’s so fucked up, that this is how her life goes. Her father, laughing and teasing, and the next moment gone, and Clarke locked up, and Lexa, in bed, arching, and now -

And it’s too much, this room, the waiting death breathing down the backs of their necks.

She’s going to scream.

*

 

She imagines their positions reversed: Clarke: failing on a bedroll with Lexa crouched beside her in the dark, knife in hand.

Clarke: dead, Lexa on her throne, black blood inside her where it belongs.

But all there is is the rasp of breath, in and out, a maddening sound that has her humming some old Earth song they’d learned on the Ark.

And Lexa, sleeping.

And Clarke, alone.

*

 

The candle gutters. Clarke scratches her nails against the earth floor, just to hear something different.

*

 

On the eleventh, or twelfth day, Lexa opens her eyes.

Clarke is sneaking back downstairs and Kilari is holding the latch up when the light from inside picks up a silvery glow.

It’s Lexa, and her eyes gleam like a _pauna’s_ , half-feral and unrecognising, even as Clarke scrambles down toward her.

“Lexa, hey,” she says. Lexa flinches, just a little bit, when Clarke reaches for her, and she freezes. “You’re gonna be okay,” she says, and Lexa doesn’t answer, only takes shallow breaths and fixes her eyes on the ceiling.

“Where are we?” Lexa asks, and Clarke has been down here so long she honestly couldn’t say whether it had been one minute or twenty.

“A woman named Kilari,” Clarke says. “Indra brought us here. I wanna make sure that you’re okay. Can I do that?” A long moment passes before Lexa gives her a nod, and she carefully rolls up the blanket.

Lexa’s thrashing hadn’t opened up the wound, and it’s healing well. She sighs in relief and looks up to see Lexa watching her intently.

“How long have we been down here?’

“I don’t know. Almost twelve days, I think.”

“The Ambassadors. They took control?”

“Yes,” Clarke says.

“But you’re here,” Lexa says, and she looks at her in that way she has that makes Clarke want to squirm away, sometimes.

“You should get some sleep,” Clarke says eventually, when she can no longer stand to see Lexa’s face in the flickering light.

*

 

Lexa is awake in small bursts of time after that. She wakes quickly, and makes no sound, and Clarke has nearly jumped out her skin more than once at the sound of a whispered “Clarke” when she was sure that Lexa was asleep.

It makes this room seem smaller somehow, that Lexa is awake, watching her with bright eyes and shifting uncomfortably whenever Clarke comes near. It’s a reminder of how forced this is, how people don’t usually move from sleeping together to… whatever this is.

And Lexa is, by nature, a solitary person. She likes to meditate, and sneaks off whenever she can to the surrounding woods. She had invited Clarke once after Skaikru had been added to the Coalition.

And Clarke had said no. She doesn’t remember why, exactly, but she knows it had something to do with that dizzying tilt of power when Lexa had tipped her face up towards Clarke, on her knees, and swore fealty. She had had the sneaking feeling that if she had gone with her, that power imbalance would have tilted right back away from her.

Anyway.

It’s weird. It’s a strange anti-climax to the desperation of the last couple of weeks, and Clarke finds her legs carrying her to the foot of the stairs. She takes to sitting there when Lexa is awake, pretending not to watch her as she tests the boundaries of her movement.

Once, Lexa is awake, and making irritating huffing noises as she tries to push herself to a sitting position, and Clarke has just decided that this stupid holding pattern they’ve gotten themselves into has to end, when Lexa lets out a yelp.

“I’m fine,” she says, when Clarke rushes over, pushing her down to get a look at her stomach.

“You’re not,” Clarke snaps. She is so sick of this. “You’ve got a hole through you, Lexa. You are not fine.” Lexa fixes her with that burning gaze of hers, then determinedly looks away. Clarke reaches to pull the edge of the blanket away, then pauses. “Can I?’

Lexa stiffens up, and Clarke stops. “I can’t help you unless you tell me,” Clarke says, and her hands ball up on the ratty blanket, and her frustration seems to bound out of her and back, confined in this ridiculous room with this ridiculous person who is apparently content to spend the rest of her life staring at the ceiling and pretending that Clarke doesn’t exist.

“It’s quiet,” Lexa says, and Clarke opens her mouth to say, of course it is, but Lexa stops her with a look. “In here.” She lifts her arm with some effort and brushes her neck. “I was… not entirely here, but I felt Titus try to take the Spirit from me, and the Commanders have not spoken to me since then. Do you know what it feels like, to wake up and have something missing?”

Lexa had meant it as a rhetorical question, but Clarke answers anyway. “ I do.”

Lexa looks at her, and there is that frisson of _something_ , that feeling in her stomach that makes her drop her gaze. Lexa continues.

“He tried to take the Flame,” Lexa says. “Did you see?”

“Yes.” Lexa’s skin had opened easily, too easily. There’s going to be an ugly scar.

“I’ve seen your face when I speak of the Flame. You humour me. You think it is superstition.”

“I thought,” Clarke says. “I’m not so sure now.”

“The Commander is chosen from those of us with the strength to carry it. We are taken from our homes, trained. The best of us kill each other for the honour, and it is gone. Almost everyone I love was taken from me for the sake of the Flame, and now it does not speak to me.”

At some point, Lexa shifted to stare at the ceiling. Clarke lays down beside her, suddenly tired of looming over her.

She has a lovely profile, especially in candlelight. If Clarke hadn’t been in Lexa’s room, if she had left earlier -

If, if, if.

Lexa’s arm flops out of the blanket and wraps itself in Clarke’s shirt. She shouldn’t strictly be stretching her stomach muscles yet, but this is the first time that Lexa has reached for her since she woke, and she doesn’t move.

“Don’t go,” Lexa mumbles, words barely understandable as they begin to slur together.

“ _Sha_ , Heda,” Clarke says, inexplicably tender all of a sudden, and Lexa falls asleep.

*

 

They are doing everything all out of order, she thinks. Sex, then death and now a lazy intimacy, Lexa tucked into her side in a way that started off stiff and is now almost second nature, Clarke’s arm curving around her hip and touching the bare skin.

That first afternoon seems so long ago, the rush and the desperation of it, the way that Lexa had allowed Clarke to pull her clothes off with a single-mindedness that refused to let her forget that every moment was precious.

Now Lexa wears a loose shirt to keep her warm, and the air is quiet and easy. Lexa’s touch across her skin raises goosebumps and nothing else, and the dark is like a buffer, and secrets spill like salt.

“Anya didn’t want to be my _fos_ in the beginning,” Lexa says. “She was a decorated warrior. Everyone knew her name. She infiltrated a Desert Clan camp and stole their leader’s sword from under his nose, and brought it back to the Commander. We’d just started sword training and I was one of the slowest, covered in bruises. She said I was scrawny.”

“I bet you were cute.”

“I was small. There were bigger children, faster children. But I practised the most. She found me in the yard in the early morning and beat me black and blue with the practice sword. Then she accepted me as her _seken._ She told me that she would teach me how to use my size to my advantage. She was so disappointed when I grew.” Lexa laughs, a private thing that seems to stir the air.

“I slept at the foot of her bed for a week, after Costia,” Lexa says, and her voice drips with pain.

Clarke thinks of all the people who Lexa has lost, all of the people who have carried off pieces of her when they died, and squeezes tighter.

“I’m not surprised she didn’t like you much,” Lexa says, and Clarke laughs.

“Well, I don’t think my friends like you much either, so I’d say we’re even.”

*

 

“My father would have loved you,” Clarke confesses later, voice whittled down to a whisper. Lexa brushes her lips across Clarke’s, kisses her gently, and doesn’t stop for a long time.

*

 

But they have a war to win.

Kilari walks down the steps one day, face drawn, and Clarke knows that whatever small peace that she had found with Lexa is over now. Lexa can tell, too, and she climbs to her feet.

(It’s been three weeks since the shooting, and Kilari says that Natblidas heal unnaturally fast, but she can’t help but lean toward Lexa as she struggles up.)

She begins to speak. Clarke is standing next to Lexa, their arms brushing, and with every word, Lexa grows stiller and stiller, until the only sign of life is the high bloom in her cheeks.

*

 

Clarke places the scabbard in in Lexa’s waiting palm.

“Thank you, Clarke,” Lexa says. She still won’t look at her.

She’s angry, Clarke can see, holding her head in that way she does when a Clan leader oversteps their bounds. She heard about Lexa kicking that Ice Nation envoy out of a window, and she imagines that Lexa probably looked like this beforehand; full of a coiled, dangerous energy, body humming with banked energy.

And, come to think of it, Clarke’s angry too. Angry, and afraid of what they’re going to do next. She can smell death coming, even here in this quiet house.

“I’m a fool,” Lexa says.

There isn’t any point in hiding any more, and they are in the main room. The table that Clarke had cut Lexa open on is in the same place. Everything looks the same.

Except Illiana is dead, and Ontari is in the Tower.

Except Ontari is in the Tower, and she has killed a Nightblood.

Kilari says that his name was Xavier. Clarke vaguely remembers a skinny boy with red hair, vicious with a spear in training and hovering in Lexa’s shadow for as long as she would allow.

When Kilari told them, Lexa had let out a sound like she had been kicked in the chest, and the fingers of her hand dug into Clarke’s arm painfully enough that she still carries the mark.

They had discussed how long they had to wait before Lexa would go back, the plans that they would put in place. No one in the Tower would never harm the Natblidas, Lexa had said.

“You didn’t know.”

“It doesn’t matter. I am the Commander. I have been _here_ , hiding like a rat in a hole, while children fight my battles for me.”

And there’s nothing to say, really, because they weren’t wrong. Lexa had nearly died too many times to count, locked in that room, and Clarke could barely get herself to consider the world outside of that.

But Lexa looks at her and _knows_ , as if Clarke had spoken out loud, and that feeling, that knowing is worth more than she can say. She feels it settle somewhere deep within her, permanent.

So she gets dressed, and wraps a clean bandage around Lexa’s almost-healed wound. It’ll probably open again, before this is over.

*

 

Many think that Lexa is dead, Kilari says. Illiana had spread rumours and no one who knew the truth had countered them, afraid of increasing the intensity of the search parties, and the Natblidas had been summoned from their meal to prepare for the Conclave.

(Lexa hadn’t told her much about that, only keeping to the basics.

“The Seda pick the oldest and strongest of the current group of Natblidas, and concentrate their training there. The rest are sent back to their villages. Most go on to become leaders. Some don’t.

She had swallowed, visibly.

“When the last Commander died, they separated us immediately. He had been dragged under by a _wodakrola_ , and his body was not recovered for almost a week. I spent that time in a windowless room in the undercroft of the tower.”

It was… not pleasant,” Lexa continued. “They feed and water you, but you spend most of the day alone. You are meant to be meditating on your role to come, but all I could do was pace. Costia - “ and she had looked at Clarke to gauge her reaction to her name, but Clarke did nothing, only continue the slow stroking of Lexa’s hair - “she snuck in, one day. Told me that if I didn’t make it through then she would follow me to the next life to make sure i never forgot it.” She had laughed, then.

“On the fifth day, they took us out and lined us up to watch the body burn. And then we fought.” And Lexa stopped there. Clarke had debated pushing, but Lexa’s eyes were luminous, absorbing the candlelight in that way they had, and it felt like pressing down on a bruise to see her like that.)

No one had been suspicious when the Natblida had disappeared from view, and it was only when a small, crumpled figure, stained black, had been found outside of the audience chamber, that someone had known what was amiss.

Yehad had come to Kilari with the news, early that morning, speaking of a dark-haired Natblida with an Ice Nation accent. She had interrupted the council of the twelve clans, and she and Dyar, the Ice Nation Ambassador, had killed Illiana in a quiet alley.

The Woods Clan hadn’t dared to retaliate, boxed in and leaderless as they were, the next likely candidate for Commander a twelve year old boy without a single kill scar, and the Council was in deadlock.

It was kept secret,” Kilari says. “They tried to keep the struggle quiet, made it sound like it was the usual politics after an important death. But Ontari doesn’t have enough clans on their side to avoid an all-out war.” Lexa lets out a breath, relief and that simmering anger mixed in one.

“The Broadleaf Clan.” Clarke looks askance, and Lexa takes a moment from buckling on her armour to explain. “They used to ally with the Woods Clan against the Ice Nation. Their history is almost as bloody as Trikru and the Mountain.”

“The Boat People also, Heda,” Kilari says, and they exchange a look with undertones too subtle for Clarke to parse.

“So…” Clarke says. “She’s trying to draw you out.”

“Ontari is not a fool,” Lexa says. “She will have known that I disappeared after my so-called death. She must have tried to win the throne on the strength of my reported death alone, but Ice Nation are not loved. And she is not especially charismatic,” she adds on the end, looking grimly pleased.

And Clarke understands in a flash. Lexa sees her understand, and visibly braces herself for the onslaught.

“She killed that boy to draw you out,” Clarke says. “ She plans to kill you-” a knife across her throat, maybe, or a spear through the chest, unmendable this time-  “ and you are planning to walk right to her.”

“She killed my charge,” Lexa says. “Only the worst kind of _natrona_ would let a _strikon_ under their protection die without retribution.” Her accent is thickening in that way it does when she is angry, and for a moment, her anger comes close to matching Clarke’s before it disappears behind a wall of calm.

“You’re playing right into her hands,” Clarke says. “And you know you are, which cranks the stupidity of this plan all the way up to eleven.” Lexa looks at her sharply, and she glares right back. “Don’t try that. Don’t pull that with me. _You knelt to me_.”

And it’s a low blow, probably, but Clarke barely sees it land before Lexa straightens up. “I knelt to you,” she says quietly, “to show fealty. As I owe fealty to all of my people. This is my battle. This will always be my battle. You must understand that.”

At some point, Kilari had slipped out of the room, and it is just the two of them, close enough that Clarke could wrap her arms around her.

“You know I do,” Clarke says. “I do. But,” and if Clarke was a different person, or if she had lived a different life, she would probably be crying right about now. “It’s always you. ” She not expecting an answer, but Lexa speaks anyway.

And the Commander is back, fierce, forbidding, with the power of a person who carries a storm in their hands.

“ _Ai laik Heda_ ,” Lexa says. “ _Non na throu daun gon ai._ ”

*

 

Clarke helps Lexa with her warpaint, matching the design as close as she can to what she remembers. Lexa stays still, allowing Clarke to smudge the paint carefully along her cheekbones, rub her thumb down the bridge of her nose.

She is prepared for Lexa to tell her to stay behind, to remind her that the kill order is still in place, but when she is done, Lexa sits her in a stool and does the same for her, drawing careful lines of black on her skin. She can’t help but flinch at the unfamiliar feeling, and Lexa puts delicate fingers on her chin to steady her.

There isn’t much in the way of armour, because Lexa doesn’t quite have the strength to fight in it and Clarke doesn’t know how to, so they settle for leather vests and armbraces for Lexa.

“This is a terrible plan,” Clarke says, but her heart is soaring fiercely. Lexa looks at her, a small smile on her face.

“Not one of my best,” Lexa says.

It loosens the tension a little, allows Clarke to breathe, and she grasps Lexa’s hand. Just for a moment, and she lets go.

They duck out of the concealed entrance that Lexa was carried through, what seems like months ago, and Yehad waits just outside. He bows deeply when he sees Lexa.

“Heda.” Lexa eyes him, before clasping his arm in the Grounder greeting.

“ _Mochof_ ,” she says once, quietly.

And they set off.

*

 

It starts as just the two of them, walking along a quiet road adjacent to the main, but it doesn’t take long for someone to notice.

Lexa is well known, and liked to wander the city when she was younger, so she is easily recognised. First it’s the little children, then their parents, curious about what has drawn the little ones’ attention. At first Yehad can keep them away, but soon the crowd is large, and rowdy.

“No more hiding,” Lexa had said, and Clarke had agreed.

“Heda lives,” Yehad says, and it passes from person to person, the whispering carrying them like a tide.

This is the most dangerous part of their plan. Lexa has made some unpopular decisions in the last few months, and there is a chance

(More than a chance)

That the crows will turn on her, carry her to Ontari, demand a Conclave in the hope of a leader that they will find more suitable. Lexa is rigid next to her, swords in twin scabbards across her back, a bead of sweat forming at her brow, but they march on.

“ _Fous gon daun_ ,’” Yehad shouts, his voice a roar that seems to echo off the densely packed buildings.

Clarke can almost feel the excitement as a ripple through the crowd. It sends adrenaline churning through her gut and she takes a deliberate breath, slowly, focusing on where she is going. Lexa glows darkly next to her, the black of her clothing seeming to absorb all light.

The energy of the crowd is infectious, and it leaves Clarke with a buzzing, invincible feeling, like she’s drunk a cup of Monty’s moonshine. Except the sun is shining down, and the swell of the crowd carries them forward, and they are going to finish this.

*

 

The top of the Commander’s tower is visible from most places in Polis, and it takes a while before they get close. Clarke’s hips and feet ache, but she keeps her back straight. Next to her, Lexa reaches her right hand behind her back and pulls out a sword. She sweeps it through the air, the iron almost seeming to sing, the dark metal gleaming in the light of the now-setting sun.

Ontari is waiting - of course she is - the noise can probably be heard from every corner of Polis. She looks the same, strong and arrogant, an axe clutched in her hand.

“The coward returns,” Ontari says, and Clarke is lucky that her Trigedasleng is slow enough that she can follow. “Come crawling from her hiding place. Welcome home.” She chuckles, and the dozen warriors gathered behind her - Ice Nation mostly, but some with markings that Clarke doesn’t recognise - laugh. Lexa is silent for a moment.

“Ontari, you stand accused of killing a Natblida, for conspiring to steal the throne, for abduction. What do you say?”

“You have no authority here,” Ontari says. “The Ambassadors have chosen.”

Lexa reaches behind her back and pulls the second sword from its scabbard. “Ontari. I challenge you to _fous gon daun_.” Everyone knows she’s going to say it; it’s been flitting through the crowd since they started this walk. Ontari must know it’s coming, because she holds her axe loosely in her hand.

“I accept,” she says casually.

(An old tradition, Lexa explained. Used to settle land disputes. Not to the death, usually. One warrior and their _seken_ , against a similar pair. Not a fight between leaders - Ontari is _not_  a leader, Lexa had said, teeth grinding, but a show of force, nonetheless).

Lexa nods, and calls Yehad forward. He knows, too, and is ready, with a large sword that gets wider towards the end, and a heavy looking wooden shield.

He isn’t her _seken_ , but they have trained together before, and it shows in the way that they move. He holds the shield in his right hand and Lexa steps behind it.

Ontari smiles, and says something in the Ice Nation tongue. Two warriors of the dozen behind her step forward.

“They will take my place,” Ontari says.

“A coward, like your former _Kwin_ ,” Lexa says, and the fight begins.

The battle between Lexa and Roan was beautiful, in its own terrible way. They had danced around each other, weapons singing as they clashed, bodies moving as if in a dance.

This one isn’t like that.

The two Ice Nation warriors are similarly built, square and powerful, and they both hold axes. They hack at Yehad’s shield with a single-minded determination that leaves deep chunks carved out of the wood.

Meanwhile, Lexa attacks whenever they get past Yehad’s guard, twisting out of the way when they stab at her.  She looks more in danger from Yehad’s sword than the Ice Nation warriors as he stabs out, keeping them away.

Suddenly there is a shout, and a groan of pain from inside the melee, and Clarke’s heart sinks when she sees that Yehad is bleeding from a wound in his side. He fights on with a grim determination, lifting the shield higher.

The space is silent, only the sound of metal scraping and harsh breathing from inside the circle. Yehad’s face is screwed up in pain, and Clarke can see that Lexa is trying to press them back, overwhelm them while he is still standing. She kicks one in the fork of her knee but the other one turns on her, forcing her to twist and defend herself.

The fight continues, ugly, unrelenting, and the ground beneath their feet churns and muddies with sweat and blood.

It ends suddenly and brutally, with a quick cross of Lexa’s swords across the front and back of one of the warriors’ legs. There is a spurt of arterial blood as she slices through the quadriceps and hamstrings simultaneously, and the warrior screams. Her companion is quickly felled by Yehad’s sword, pushed into her chest.

Clarke can see that the leg is ruined, the warrior’s heart pumping blood out at a fatal rate. Lexa can see it, too, and she steps back.

“Concede, Ontari,” she calls, and the crowd shakes shakes out of their stupor. Someone picks up a cry of Heda Lexa, and it spreads like wildfire. Ontari looks trapped, eyes darting around as if there will be an escape.

Lexa trembles, a minute shake that Clarke doesn’t think that anyone else sees. She hopes her wound hasn’t torn open.

“Take her away,” Lexa orders. There is a heavy pause, before two warriors from the tower come out of the crowd. “Lock her up. I will deal with her.”

Later, whenever Clarke thinks about this moment, she can never quite pin down what exactly tipped her off. Maybe it was adrenaline from the fight, or noticing a shifting of weight at just the right time. It’s the kind of thing that Lexa would have picked up on, but she is half delirious with exhaustion, the strain almost too much for her still-healing body, and she is too slow to block when Ontari snaps the wrist of the guard holding her arms, slashes the second across the face with a small knife, and charges at Lexa. She gets an arm around her neck and is squeezing, but Clarke is already on the move, the long knife that Lexa had given to her earlier is in her hand.

And then it is in Ontari’s back, and Lexa is twisting, sword coming up to slice into her throat.

It’s an ugly, messy death. It only turns the ground darker.

Lexa’s shudders, and Clarke realises that she is nearly finished. But the air is expectant. People press in, looking for weakness, assessing them both to see what exactly they are dealing with.  

Of course, that is when Lexa’s knees buckle, and Clarke slips a hand under her elbow.

“Pull yourself together,” she hisses under her breath. It’s harsh, but it works, and Lexa stands tall.

Even now, practically dead on her feet, she has a way of holding a crowd, and she looks especially wild, with strands of hair coming out of her braids, sweat and paint running down her face and turning it almost ghastly.

“ _Ai laik yo Heda,_ ” Lexa says, and quiet as it is, her voice carries across the square. “ _Sha o no_?”

*

 

They can hear the sounds of the revelling even from the Commander’s rooms, nestled deep in the tower. The sun is setting finally, and Lexa is back in her room in the tower.

“Clarke,” Lexa says. She is reclining against a pillow, content, as Clarke moves around the room pointlessly, picking up random objects before placing them back. Clarke ignores her in favour of pacing to the window and fiddling with the latch.

“Clarke,” Lexa says, louder, and when she turns, Lexa is watching her intently. “Will you rest?”

It would be well overdue. Some council members led by the Ambassador from the Plains Riders Clan, had protested Lexa’s return, during a thankfully short audience.

“We are, of course, glad to see you are well and good, Heda,” one had said. He had two rings on each of his thumbs, and he twiddled them as he spoke. “The Spirit truly favours you. However, we must consider the damage that has been done to the succession by this turn of events.”

“As I see it, the succession is decided. The next Commander will be chosen after my death. That time has not yet come. You’ll forgive me for being unclear on your confusion.”

He had hesitated, his hands coming down to his sides. The other ambassadors watched them, clearly looking for a sign of weakness. Lexa had smiled thinly.

“I can assure you, Ambassador Eston, that you have a much better chance of getting whatever it is that you been promised if you stop this now.”

And eventually, they all swore fealty. It had stung to see them do it, after that betrayal. After the race through the Tower to get Lexa out before they came to kill her. But that was the Coalition. And Clarke was enough of a politician’s child to see the necessity of it.

Then Lexa was back in her tower, like the last three weeks had not happened.

And Clarke should be happy. This could not have gone any better. But the last few hours that she had spent in this tower is a time that Clarke never wants to think about again.

“Please sit.” Lexa is worried now, her glow fading as Clarke paces.

“We should convene a meeting of the council tomorrow. We should press the advantage, now.”

And then Lexa is standing, limping slowly to where Clarke is now smoothing the Commander’s cape, folded over a chair like normal. She slips an arm around Clarke, partly for comfort and partly to help herself balance.

“You were wonderful, today,” Lexa says, lips brushing her ear, and Clarke shivers. “You saved my life. Again.” She tugs gently. “Our responsibilities are not going anywhere. I can handle the Council. We can have one evening, I think.”

Clarke allows Lexa to pull her to the bed, and she climbs in. It’s as soft as she remembers, and she finds herself sinking in, despite herself. Lexa lies on her stomach, and Clarke turns on her side so she can face her.

Neither of them speak, and Clarke tries her best to enjoy the moment, the dying light coming through the windows, the revelling outside.

Lexa had left early, to general displeasure, and Clarke had given her a half-hour head start, partly because she knew that Lexa had gone to visit with the newly-released _Natblidas_ , and also as an attempt at discretion.

“Yehad tells me that you made quite the impression,” Lexa says. She’s only a few inches away, too close to see her face in full, and Clarke can see the sweep of eyelashes against her cheek, a spray of freckles against her skin.

“Shining like the sun,” Lexa continues, softer. “Apparently not many people saw you go after Ontari until your knife was in her back. Your legend has grown.”

“All those years of training,” Lexa continues wistfully, “undone by one girl from the Sky.” She is smiling, though, that small lift of mouth that Clarke sees so rarely. She pokes her uninjured side.

She hasn’t seen Lexa like this, so open, happy, scooting closer to Clarke until she can press her forehead against her shoulder. It feels precious, like a baby bird landing in her palm. She pushes all thoughts of tomorrow out of her head and loops her free arm around Lexa’s back, shivering when she exhales against the exposed skin around her clavicle.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to urge Lexa carefully onto her back and and hover over her, and press kisses to her skin. Lexa reaches up, trying to connect their mouths, but Clarke evades her easily.

“You are not being fair,” Lexa breathes out, and Clarke grins.

The first kiss tastes like absolution. 

*

 

They have to stop when Clarke shifts the wrong way and leans on a new cut, and Lexa gasps in pain.

“Sorry, sorry,” Clarke gasps. She shifts her weight  - there is a shallow cut that runs down Lexa’s side, not dangerous, but painful, certainly. Lexa’s still grimacing, and she reaches for Clarke, who shifts off her.

“I’m not being a very good medic,” Clarke says. Lexa looks like she is considering reaching for her again, but she tucks her hands away with a sigh.

“We have time,” Clarke says, even as it seems like time has become a physical being, slipping through her fingers like sand. She distracts herself by pushing Lexa’s shirt up to check on her wounds; Lexa, used to it by this point, allows herself to be posed as necessary and only lets out huffs of displeasure as Clarke traces the her finger around the worst of the bruising.

It’s painful looking, but she really will be okay, and Clarke presses a kiss to her stomach, feels the muscles ripple under her touch.

She is pulled up by a hand in her hair, urging her to look up.

“Come here,” Lexa whispers, and there are exploding stars in her eyes, galaxies more beautiful than anything she saw when she lived among the stars.

*

 

That was a good day.

The next is a bad one.

Xavier is wrapped in a white cloth, on a bier, a curl of red hair peeking from one end. The _Sedas_ recite prayers, but it is Lexa, standing on dais with the other _Natblidas_ , who lights the flame.

She looks severe in the light of the flames, unbending, spine hammered straight by the ceremony of the occasion. But Clarke has spent enough time with her now to know to look for the tight skin around her eyes, her white-knuckled grip on the torch.

After, Lexa leaves to see Titus, who had spent ten days in the dungeons with an Ice Nation torturer under Ontari’s supervision, Ontari desperate to find where Lexa was.

The healers had told her that he was not expected to survive, and Lexa had taken the news with nothing more than a nod of the head.

“I must see him,” she had said, tone on a knife edge between relief and grief. Clarke had spent the time in the Tower library, making a note of the volumes that needed to be copied for transport back to Arkadia.

It was easy to get lost in the work, cataloguing records on weather patterns, animal migration, and histories of the twelve clans, and it wasn’t until the sun had set and an assistant approached her with a lantern that she had realised how late it had gotten.

When she makes her way back to Lexa’s room, she finds her leaning against the windows, breathing in the night air.

“You’re planning to leave soon,” Lexa says, matter of fact, still turned away.

“Yes.” Lexa turns to face her, resignation carved into every line of her face.

“You’ve been gone for a while.”

“Yes.”

“Your people need you.” Clarke lifts her shoulder.

“You will take guards,” Lexa says, in that way she has of making something sound equally like a request and a statement. “You are exempted from the kill order, but the woods are not safe.”

“Fine with me,” Clarke says, trying to inject lightness into her voice, trying to hold on the that last shining moment of _them_ , before it goes away.

“Do you have a plan?”

“Yes.” She hesitates. “You’re not gonna like it. But I’ll need your help.”

Lexa’s face darkens, but she nods.

“Tell me.”

“I found a scroll in the library,” Clarke begins.

*

 

Four days later, Lexa sees Clarke off on a misty morning, in full Commander regalia. She will be in council meetings this day and the next, all day, wrestling power back, and it already has her in a foul mood made worse by watching Clarke load her belongings onto a sand-coloured horse.

Clarke watches as she barks orders at the guards, micromanaging everything they do from saddling their horses to the kind of provisions they have.

When Lexa starts to interrogate the main guard - the leader who had introduced himself as Kaza, about the places they were going to stop to water their horses, Clarke steps in.

“Commander, a word. Please.” Lexa gives her a dark look, but allows Clarke to lead her a little way away.

“Stop badgering them,” Clarke says.

“I’m afraid I’m not familiar with that word, Clarke,” Lexa says.

“We are going to be fine,” Clarke says, ignoring her. Lexa nods impassively, but when they walk back to the group, keeps silent.

Soon, they are all mounted, and waiting for Clarke. She considers for a moment, before pulling Lexa into a hug. Lexa stiffens, then hugs her back, gently, always mindful of watching eyes.

Clarke pulls back, and manages to get onto her horse without embarrassing herself too much, and then it really is the end.

“Wait.” There is a warm palm pressed to her thigh. She looks down to see Lexa gazing up at her, emotion visible behind the war paint.

“I will miss you very much,” she says quietly, almost too quiet for Clarke to hear. Clarke covers the fingers on her thigh with her own.

“And I will miss you,” The admission seems heavy, somehow, too much for a crisp morning with the sun shining bright.

Lexa nods once, sharply, and they are off. Clarke doesn’t look back until they are almost out of sight, and when she does, there is a small figure in black, motionless, watching them go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to respond to the comments on the first chapter tomorrow, but first a nap!
> 
> Trigedasleng words/phrases that I made up (I made up the ones with asterisks and it probably shows but oh well)
> 
> Wodakrola* - Crocodile (literally, water crawler but after 100 years of mutation, yikes)  
> Fous gon daun* - Duel of twos (literally, group fight)  
> Seda - Teacher aka Titus  
> Ai laik yu heda, sha o no - I am your Heda, yes or no?


	3. Chapter 3

_May we meet again._

 

  * __Heda Leksa Kom Trikru, Fourteenth Flamebearer and Founder of Kongeda__



 

* * *

  

They move through the wood in quiet procession: one warrior, then Clarke, and then the wagon piled with tribute from Polis, and the last two warriors in the end. The rear guards take turns riding ahead of the group, scouting and reporting back on any activity.

The woods aren’t as dense as Clarke remembers. The light filters through the leaves and forms charming patterns on the trunks of the trees. Her horse seems to know well enough where it is going, and the guards crowd close, no doubt obeying orders from _Heda_.

The woods are also quiet. It gives her too much time to think.

*

They spend a tense night sleeping in the mouth of a system of caves. The cave they pick is set back from the road and turned at an angle, and to the casual observer it looks like no more than a large rock. The interior is dry and snug, and before long she is awake for her watch, sitting away from the embers of the fire to keep her eyes adjusted to the dark.

It had taken Lexa the better part of three days to organise the materials that Clarke had asked for - the last of the _tek_ from the Ark, collected by Clarke herself and a troop of warriors, sacks of seedlings and grain, and a leather satchel that contained established trade routes, communication codes and one half of a set of long range radios that Clarke had taken with her when she left Arkadia.

A peace offering, Lexa had said, one eyebrow raised neatly, hands clasped together. How very Ambassadorial of you.

*

Clarke’s been trying the radio almost constantly since they left Polis, but she doesn’t get anything but dead air until they’re a day or so away from Arkadia. Even then, the only thing that comes through the radio is static until they get to the top of a hill that’s high enough that they can see for miles.

“Octavia. Come in.” They spend a tense twenty minutes waiting, Clarke calling out for Octavia in five minute intervals until she is startled by a voice on the other end.

“Clarke?”

“Finally,” Clarke says. “Where are you? Um, over.”

“In the woods around Arkadia,” Octavia says. “With the Trigeda scouts.”

“We should meet,” Clarke says.

“At the dropship,” Octavia agrees.

*

The dropship is only a half day’s ride, and they leave the next morning, back on the trail before the sun has properly risen. The soldiers are uncomfortable here, she can tell, fidgeting and keeping a sharp eye out for trouble. Kaza, the leader, tells her why.

“Many animals here,” he says. “Danger, even for a group. Once, attacked.” He rolls up his sleeve to show an ugly scar on his arm.

“We’ll be quick,” she says, but they still go slowly. The nearer they get to the dropship, the more signs of human habitations start to appear, from badly stripped branches to an assortment of garbage, more and more frequent until they get to the scorched earth just outside the old perimeter.

It’s an ugly piece of earth, with a few hopeful shoots of grass sprouting up here and there. It smells faintly acrid even now. Kaza rides in front of her and she lets herself fall back as he and his soldiers mark out the perimeter, checking for danger and posting themselves at even intervals.

She gets off her horse and ties it up securely, and makes for the dropship.

It’s smaller than she remembers. And darker, and it smells nothing like space. Even so, she closes her eyes for a moment and remembers the ride down, the desperate hurdle, the one girl who had gotten loose from her seat and died on the way down. And Wells, her best friend, who she had hated so fiercely.

Kaza knocks on the side of the metal, and she nearly pulls her knife at the harsh boom. “Your companion is here.”

“ _Mochof_.” she says.

*

She’s surprised when Octavia follows soon after, wrinkling her nose at the smell.

“You were taking too long,” she says. She looks the same, maybe a little fiercer. She’s wearing war paint on her face and she has an unstrung bow hanging over her back. She stops for a moment, considering, and steps forward

And they hug. It doesn’t feel quite right; too sharp, almost, like they might hurt each other if they hold on too tight, but Clarke tries anyway.

*

The side of the ship is rusted in some places and sunlight peeks through in little pinpricks that leave little spots of light on Octavia’s face.

“I’ve been reading through the Woods Clan library,” Clarke says. “They have all these books on biology. I got them to help me translate, and one of them talked about the disease they infected us with. They call it _jus wamplei_.”

“Red death,” Octavia, says. She looks uneasy, probably remembering the delinquents’ camp in those few days, everyone sick in a way that they had only read about in books.

“I brought it with me,” Clarke says.”It’ll stay active for at least a few more days.” Her pack is right next to her, but her fingers twitch with the need to open it up and check that the carefully wrapped pack is still there.

The disease that the Grounders had infected them with wasn’t a virus, but some kind of mutated fungus. Nyko kept a live sample  - for study, Lexa had said, but the glint in her eyes said otherwise - and would provide her with enough to take down a small army.

“We should be okay,” Clarke finishes up. “The hundred, I mean. It doesn’t get you twice.”

“Shitty way to die,” Octavia says, but she doesn’t sound as disapproving as Clarke had feared.

“It’s a shitty situation,” she says instead, and tries not to think of all the death that may follow this. No one has called her Wanheda in a while, but the name echoes through her anyway.

“Will you help me?” Clarke asks.

Octavia nods, slowly. “They have Lincoln,” she says. “And, fuck Pike, right?”

Clarke smiles. It seems to break something open in her chest, something light. “Fuck Pike,” she agrees.

*

An hour before they reach Arkadia, Clarke stops to uncover the wagon. She checks every sack of grain, every piece of _tek_ scavenged from the dropship, her hands running over the exposed surface. She shakes out the maps and trade routes and communication codes, scratched into the surface of a translucent paper-like material in a neat series of lines and crosses, a _Seda’s_ neat script writing translations of Trigedasleng words to English.

She straightens them out, hands smoothing them out, feeling the thinness of the papers, the smooth indents of the writing.

Her stomach churns, and she is lightheaded, but the guards are watching, and they have to go on.

*

She climbs off her horse and leaves Indra and the guards at the treeline. The horses that pull the wagon are docile and agreeable and they allow her to lead them to the entrance of Arkadia.

She’s a couple of hundred feet away when the gate creaks open, and about ten black-uniformed guards venture out and advance slowly. She waits, the nearest horse lipping at the collar of her shirt, as they come closer.

“I’m alone,” she says, when the one at the front is close enough to hear her. He looks vaguely familiar, and she thinks that maybe he was one of her classmates’ parents, but his eyes are cold and empty as he points a gun at her.

“Walk forward,” she says, and she does. She kneels on the ground and allows him to kick her down and plant a knee in the centre of her back. He pushes a hand into the back of her head, grinding her face into the dirt.

“Grounder trash,” he says, and spits at the dirt near her head.

“Take me to Pike,” she says.

*

They keep the wagon outside, near the gates, while Pike makes his way out.

“Clarke,” he says. He looks the same. Tired, maybe. More lines around his mouth and eyes. But he smiles when he sees her.

“We thought you were dead,” he says. “Your mother will be happy to see you.”

“ _Heda_ brings you a peace offering,” she says.

“Good to know,” Pike says. “We’re not interested.”

She is in the middle of a circle of soldiers, onlookers at a distance,. She can feel them bristling behind her.

“Trade routes,” Clarke says, “salvaged technology from Polis. And maps. She’s not asking for anything else in return.” He looks at her, impassive, calculating, and she stands straight.

“Arkadia is a free nation,” he says, “ and I’m not going to allow anything to sabotage that.”

“ _Heda_ is agreed to concede the land to you,” she says, “in return for a ceasefire, and an agreement to live peacefully.”

Pike has become prideful and cruel since landing on earth, but he has never been stupid, and he was the earth skills teacher.  The people of Arkadia have very little skill in farming or living off the land, and food has to be scarce. If Pike has any intention of keeping his people alive, he’s going to have to concede _something._

*

In the end, he forces Clarke to the wagon.

“I know how Grounders are,” he says, and watches intently as she runs her hands through the sacks of grain, lays the tek out on the ground in the sunshine, shakes out the satchel with the maps.

But there are no hidden traps, no shards of metal in the seed, no poison (he makes her eat some, to be sure), and in the end, the gift is accepted.

Clarke climbs off the wagon with the grain, legs shaking, and is not surprised when two soldiers force her hands behind her back.

“I’m sure you understand,” Pike says. She cranes her neck in time to watch him pick up the satchel with the maps, eyes bright.

*

They lock her in an abandoned room off the main hallways.  The floor isn’t quite level, and slopes downward away from the door.

Her hands are dusty, still, and she wipes them on the bottom of her shirt. The only window in the room is far above her head, even in the tilted room.

*

Her mother comes to visit her, and she presses her hands through the grill on the door. They’ve put a fine mesh over the opening, and if Clarke tries, she’d probably be just about able to touch her fingers. She stays where she is.

“Oh, Clarke.” Her mother is crying, quietly. She hadn’t done that even when Clarke’s dad died

(had been killed)

And she seems ashamed of it, turning her face away and scrubbing at her eyes.

“You look good,” Abby says. “Have you been in Polis all this time?”

“Mostly.”

“I get five minutes with you. We don’t have much time.”

“Have you seen Octavia?” Abby nods.

“We’ve set up a signal. it's under control.”

*

She blinks her eyes open, and Pike is standing over her. He has a pistol in his hand, and he holds it loosely at his side.

“I’m grateful for your help, Clarke. But I really do have to know what you’ve been up to.”

She props herself on the hard mattress and casts a wary look at the open door.

“Don’t bother. I have half a dozen of my people right outside the door.” He ducks out for a moment and comes back with a metal chair, lowering himself into it.

“I don’t plan to hurt you, Clarke. You’re one of us. But you’re going to have to talk soon.”

The idea of him being intimidating should be laughable. She has put a knife in Ontari’s back, has nursed a warlord back to health from a hole in the ground. But there must be more of the Arker left in her than she thought, and she fights to hold her gaze steady in the face of his disapproval.

“I already told you,” she says. “The Commander sent me here with a peace offering.”

He gives her a long looks, disappointed and casually powerful in the way that people are when they have pistols in their hands.

“Maybe another day,” he says, and leaves.

*

Her mother comes to see her the next day, quiet, nervous as the taps at the grille.

“It’s working,” Abby says, eyes bright and nervous. Clarke nods.

“Tell Octavia.”

*

The light in the little window in the corner of her cell tells her that the sun has set and risen once before Pike comes back. The guards have brought her food in regular intervals, but she hasn’t been able to eat any of it, her stomach seizing at the thought. She’s trembling, too, covered in a fine sweat that leaves her clothes damp. Lexa had told her that people were immune from the disease as long as they’d had it once, but Clarke seems to be the exception to the rule.

Pike comes back, and he looks worse than she feels, eyes red and a fine tremor in the hand that rests over the gun in the holster.

“You did something,” he says. “You poisoned us.” Clarke shakes her head.

“The food is fine,” she says. She can feel a smile spread on her face, petty, vindicated, victory shining inches away. “We’re going to need all the food we can get.”

Pike looks at her - really looks, and she watches the realisation spread across his face.

“What was it?”

“It doesn’t matter.” He levels the pistol at her face.

“Tell me what you did. Tell me how you got us sick.”

“If you’re going to shoot me, you should do it now.” Standing is a struggle, but she stays upright easier than Pike, who is swaying and blinking like maybe his vision isn’t as steady as it should be.

Pike is wavering on a knife-edge of decision, she can see. Wavering between seeing a rebel and Clarke Griffin, the kid who sat in the front of his class but copied her best friend’s homework.

Keep him talking. She saw it in an old earth movie, she thinks.

“When we first landed,” Clarke says. “We got sick. Really sick. Turns out the biological warfare was one of the few things to make it through the destruction of civilisation as we knew it. Which says a lot about us as a species, I think.”

“They sent Murphy back to us, riddled with some kind of haemorrhagic virus. A couple of kids died. I almost died.” A wave of nausea hits her, and she looks at the ceiling and swallows hard.

There’s a distant noise in the hallway, and Clarke twitches toward it before she can stop herself. Pike sees.

“They broke through a little while ago,” he says. “If not the food, where?”

“The maps,” she says, finally, “ and the _tek_ \- the radios.” Coated with a dark grey powder that Lexa had given her, carefully wrapped in a waterproof skins.

“We figured that would be the first thing the people in charge would go for. You taught us,” she adds, “about viruses, and immunity, and vaccinations.”

“I didn’t think you were listening,” he says, and he smiles as the noise - slamming doors and shouting.

“I wasn’t, really,” she says. What she remembers of that glass is doodling in a corner of her book and throwing notes at Wells on the other side of the class. “But enough of it stuck.”

There is a soft sliding sound in the hallway, as if someone is trying very hard to be quiet. Pike turns, and Clarke lunges forward, grabs the metal chair, and swings it as hard as she can into his back.

He’s so weak that he goes down like she shot him in the face, and she kicks the gun away before pinning his hands behind his back. His skin is clammy and warm, and he gives only a token protest.

Octavia skids around the corner.

“I’m fine,” Clarke says, breathing hard, and maybe she hadn’t listened as hard as she should have because she is definitely not well.

“The threat is contained,” Octavia says.

“Who’s in charge?”

“Your mom, right now,” Octavia says. “ But she’s called Kane in for a meeting. They want you to come. They’re in the conference room off the cafeteria. Or - ”she frowns. “I’m not sure if that’s where it was, before. I’ll have to show you.”

Pike retches, and a greenish liquid puddles on the ground.

“Ugh,” Octavia says. “You guys couldn’t have picked a neater weapon?”

Clarke makes her way to the door.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Pike says. “You have no idea what you’re up against.” He hasn’t moved from his position on the floor, one side of his face still pressed to the ground.

“Pike,” she says, and for the first time in days, she feels perfectly well. You’re done,” she says. Octavia locks the door behind them with a definitely-stolen pair of keys, and they walk down the hall together, Octavia strong, swords on her back and warpaint on her face, and Clarke, weak, sick, victorious.

*

She has dreams of being back in the sky, of being shoves through an airlock and floated. Except she doesn’t die, she just wheezes and gasps for air and  -

“Clarke.”

And her mother is standing over her, and she is in a room that is bright and airy. She still feels sick as hell, but she can tell that her face is clean, and when she tries to sit up, her muscles protest, but let her.

“Pike?” Her mother touches her face.

“In solitary. His soldiers are suffering, but they’re going to be fine.” Her mother’s hand lands in her hair, and Clarke is just tired enough to find it soothing. “That was foolish of you,” she continues, and Clarke glares as best as she can from her position.

“I wasn’t supposed to get sick,” she says, after weighing the pros and cons of letting this devolve into a fight. “Arkers have a weaker immune system than they planned for, I think. It worked, right?”

“Everyone else is fine,” her mother admits. “Or, is going to be. I have no idea what potency the Grounders gave us. But they probably didn’t account for someone coating her hands in a live biological weapon.”

“It worked, though,” Clarke says, leaning against her pillow.

“It did,” Abby admits.

*

“Clarke Griffin. Vomiting her way to victory.”

Raven’s brace is quieter than it was when Clarke saw her last. It only squeaks a little when she walks into the room. Clarke still feels like a little shitty, and a wave of nausea rises up when she turns on her side to face her.

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“Barely,” Raven snorts, and lever herself up onto the bed next to Clarke. “Octavia radios in to say that you’re coming in with some kind of _biological weapon_ , only she doesn’t know what, and she doesn’t know when any of it is gonna take effect, and Fox got busted trying to break into the armoury to steal guns.” She doesn’t sound all that upset, though. She loosens the straps around her brace, bending her knee slowly and grimacing.

“It was a shitshow, I’ll tell you that. I had to stop a couple of those dumbasses from running up to grab stuff out of that wagon of stuff that you brought. No wonder you guys were in the fucking sky brig.” Raven turns to look at her, eyes dark and intense in her face.

“Bellamy?” Raven shrugs.

“In holding with the rest of Pike’s men. Octavia’s trying… but we’ve agreed that he can stay where he is for now. Kane’s taken control. They say it’s temporary, but.”

There are lines of strain around her eyes as she leans back on the pillow.

“How are you doing, Raven?” It’s been a minute or so of solid silence, and Clarke regrets breaking it almost immediately when Raven’s eyes pop open.

“You don’t get to ask that,” Raven says. “I wasn’t - I know Bell and Octavia gave you shit about this already, but you left. To go and eat bark in the forest, or whatever. I know what you and Bell did. I know it must have sucked. But you don’t get to ask me that.”

The guilt comes and goes in a flash, buried under a wave of tiredness so strong that Clarke wants to close her eyes and sleep until Lexa gets here.

“I’m not your mom,” Clarke says. “You can’t take this much from me.” She stops short of saying _it’s not fair_ , like a kid who misses out on a treat. “You can’t let me in when there’s things to get done and yell at me about how I do them.”

Raven looks at her, and Clarke looks back, and despite everything, she’s missed Raven. It sits right next to the frustration and makes her vaguely nauseous.

“My leg hurts like hell,” Raven says eventually. “Most days it feels like someone drove a rusty nail through it when I was sleeping. Abby’s doing her best. But that’s not much. It sucks.”

Clarke lets out a breath, and it’s shakier than she meant, more grateful. So much of her is out of Arkadia, but the part that’s still tied to this place and these people eases a little.

“We could have done it without you,” Raven says. “Eventually. I’m glad we didn’t have to.”

*

Abby comes in a little later. She’s not surprised to see Raven there and checks on her as soon as she’s done with Clarke. Raven lets her manipulate the joints and press at sore spots and they talk like they’re picking up threads of old conversations, and Clarke watches and thinks about how the world keeps going, whether or not she’s in it.

*

_The next full moon,_ Lexa had said, holding Clarke’s hands in hers, the evening before she had left. It hadn’t seemed like long at all, at the time, with Lexa in front of her, pressing little kisses to her knuckles and sweeping Clarke’s hair away from her face, over and over.

At the time the next full moon had been three weeks away, and Clarke estimates that Lexa’s about seven days away. She moves into one of her mother’s spare rooms, and catches up with the other delinquents, but the days dig their heels in and refuse to move any faster than is completely necessary.

Kane comes to visit her a few times.

He’s looking for her mom, Clarke thinks, but he sees her, probably looking like she’s about to combust, and he sits with her while he waits for her mom to showup.

“That was pretty brave,” he say, in that way he has that would be condescending on anyone else.

She shrugs, because reactions to her little Patient Zero manoeuvre tend to be on the extremes, either way, and honestly, she’s kind of tired of hearing about it.

“We always knew you would be one to watch,” he says, and leaves before she can think of an suitable reply.

*

Lexa arrives on a cool morning.

Not Lexa, exactly, but messengers who approach Arkadia’s gates as if they are expecting to be shot, despite Octavia having ridden out to tell the scouts that Pike had been neutralised. They’s youngish-looking warriors, nervous even now after Kane has invited them beyond the gates using his best Trigedasleng. The warriors follow the impromptu welcoming group - Kane, Abby, an older Ark politician who introduces himself as Valder, and Clarke -  past the first set of gates, but no further.

“ _Heda_ requests the presence of your leaders,” he says. “She invites you for a midday meal in our camp. Do you accept?”

“We do,” Clarke says, earning her a glance from her mother.

“We will return to escort you,” one of the soldiers says. He inclines his head and rides out, the others following him until they disappear into the treeline.

*

Clarke is at the gate by midday. She hasn’t carried anything except a long knife strapped to her hip and a water flask. Abby raises an eyebrow when she gets to the gate and finds her already there, waiting, but she doesn’t say anything. Kane follows soon after, and they set off out of the gate.

About a quarter of the people with weapons training were taken down with the virus, and most of the rest are needed to keep things running, so there are only five or so people available to act as guards. Clarke looks them over and doesn’t recognise three of them, but they have the look of people who are holding weapons for maybe the third time in their lives.

There is a stirring at the treeline as soon as the gate creaks open, and by the time they are halfway there, the Grounders are almost to them.

“This way,” says the one who seems to be the leader. “Heda’s camp is not far from here,” he says.

There is a covered wagon about five feet into the trees, on the wide path that leads out of Arkadia.

“For you,” says the leader. “If you do not want to walk.”

“I’ll walk,” Clarke says immediately. She wants to keep moving, needs to work out some of the excess energy.

*

Lexa looks a little different than Clarke remembers her.

She’s not as skinny, and her face is tanned, like she’s been spending time in the sun.

She takes her time and she watches Lexa wait for her, body still and face impassive, seemingly paying more attention to Kane and Abby than Clarke.

“Commander.” Kane is the first to get to her. He doesn’t bow, or reach for her arm, and Lexa inclines her head.

“It’s good to see you again, Kane,” she says. “And Abby. I’m glad you’re well.”

It all seems very banal, like a million other meetings that Lexa has presided over. For one wild moment she wonders what Lexa would do if she threw her arms around her.

Lexa turns to face her when she finally does get to them, tiny lines of impatience sketched into her forehead where no one else will see. Impatience, and worry, folded away behind Heda’s impassive mask. Clarke bites down on a smile.

“Klark,” Lexa says, her name light on her tongue.

“ _Heda_ ,” she says, and the smile escapes for just a second. “Thank you for inviting us.”

*

The camp is made up of one hundred people at most: Lexa’s personal guard and retinue, and a few local leaders that were invited to join in on the way. They get stared at as they make their way into a tent.

Her mom shivers uncomfortably when the tent flaps close behind them, but Clarke barely notices. She’s too busy looking around. There’s no war table in this one, only a smaller, plain-looking table laden with dishes. There’s a desk in the corner with rolls of what looks like maps, and a set of bow and arrows in the corner. It looks like a tent that can be packed up and moved much quicker than the giant that Lexa brought to TonDC when they were fighting the mountain.

Lexa glances at her, and her eyes lighten a little, enough that Clarke can tell that if they were alone she would be smiling.

“This way,” Lexa says smoothly, and she leads them to the table.

*

“The crux of the matter is,” Lexa says, “the Leadership of your Sky People cannot be trusted.”

The food is long gone and Lexa is in full-on Commander mode, spine straight and arms leaning on the table in a show of casual authority. If Clarke weren’t so angry, she would appreciate the way that Lexa wields power so easily, like the knives she likes to play with.

There is a murmur of agreement around the table. After they had eaten, they were joined by the local leaders and a few other people that Clarke vaguely recognises from Polis.

“Your elected leader has waged a senseless war against the people of this land,” Lexa continues. “He has refused to learn our ways, or honour the oath you took,” and she directs her gaze at Kane, “and he killed our warriors in cold blood.”

There’s a shiver of anger at that last sentence. Everyone of is not an Arker wears the same hard expression, and it begins to feel more like an execution than a gathering.

“That leader is gone,” Kane says. “We saw the damage he was doing, and took steps to remove him. And we’re here to treat with you.”

“Again,” Lexa says.

Clarke tries to look at her but Lexa is very deliberately avoiding her gaze.

“What happens, if this Pike gains control again? What happens if he spearheads another massacre?” Lexa is flexing her fingers subtly, the leather of her gloves creaking.

“ _Heda_ ,” a man says. He’s one of the local leaders, bearded and dressed in what looks like an assortment of different items of clothing. “With respect, we have made our wishes clear.”

“You have, Alvo,” Lexa says.

“I would be honoured to remove their leader’s head myself, _Heda_ ,” and he doesn’t even sound angry, just faintly hopeful in a way that’s somehow worse.

“As Kane said,” Abby says carefully. “We are willing to work with you to mend the damage that has been done by some of our… tribe.”

“You do not work with me,” Lexa says. “You work for me.”

And honestly, it’s hard to hold onto anger when Lexa’s grandstanding is going this far. It’s not like her at all. Not at all. It almost feels like she’s stalling.

She has to bite down on her lip hard when she realises what Lexa is doing, and knows Lexa has noticed when the creak of the leather gloves stops.

“What does Heda suggest,” she says. It’s the first time she’s spoken since they sat down, and everyone turns to stare.

“Death,” says the man who had spoken before. “A slow death.”

“You would deserve it,” Lexa says. “But I won’t create martyrs. You will deliver the leader and his supporters to me,” she says to Kane. “By noon tomorrow.”

“What will you do with them?” Abby asks. Lexa looks back, implacable.

“Mete out justice.”

*

When the meeting is done, Lexa is the last to leave. She catches up to the Arker group and touches her fingers to Clarke, just for a second.

Clarke understands the message, and hangs back as her mother and Kane walk towards the outskirts of the camp.

I’ll catch up with you later, mom,” she says.

“Clarke,” he mom starts, but whatever she sees in Clarke’s face makes her pause. “Be careful,” she says instead. If they had a different relationship they would hug, but her mom only reaches out as if to touch her hair, stopping before she gets there.

“Be careful,” she says instead, and soon they are gone, and Clarke is left in the middle of the path.

*

She takes a circuitous path back to the camp, keeping to the edges and out of sight as much as possible until she arrives back at the biggest tent. The guard outside lets her in with barely a murmur, and she takes a moment to take it all in - Lexa’s swords leaned against a corner, a warm - looking cloak slung over the edge of the bed - before she kicks her boots and climbs into the bed.

Lexa always has the best stuff, even in a temporary camp in the middle of nowhere and this mattress is almost better than the one in the tower. Clarke lets out a happy sigh, and her eyes close almost before she realises she is falling asleep.

*

She wakes up, her neck prickling, keenly aware that someone is watching her even before she opens her eyes.

She does, and rolls over, and there is Lexa, still, eyes wide, looking like a child caught doing something wrong.

“Hi,” she says, a little croaky, and tries again. “Sleepy. Sorry. Bet you’re pretty happy to have me back in your bed though.” Lexa lets out a quiet laugh.

“Hello,” she says. But she doesn’t move, and she stands slightly awkwardly. Her arms are stiff, fingers fidgeting, and suddenly the distance between them feels like a punishment.

“Come here,” Clarke says, half pleads, and Lexa comes forward, half intent, half spooked, like she half expects Clarke to melt away. So Clarke leans back into the sinfully comfortable mattress, and she feels the weight at the end of the bed and twin thumps as Lexa sits down and pulls her boots off, and she deliberately doesn’t look at Lexa crawls toward her, slowly, and then Lexa is hugging her, arms strong and warm mouth pressed to her shoulder.

“ _Hei_ ,” she says, and shifts to pull them closer together. Lexa only holds on tighter.

Eventually she shifts down so she can look Lexa in the eye. Lexa considers her, green eyes huge this close up, and kisses her.

It’s softer than the first time, unhurried, Lexa’s hand coming up to wind in her hair and hold her steady. The curve of her waist is familiar despite everything, and Lexa exhales against her lips when she lets her fingers drift over the thin material of the shirt she’s wearing. They pause and Lexa dots little kisses over her skin, slow and reverent and so soft that Clarke can only handle it for a few minutes before she pulls her up.

“Take this off?” Clarke says, pulling at Lexa’s shirt, and Lexa nods and from there it’s like following the melody of an almost forgotten song, the way forward unfurling in inches, Lexa trembling underneath her in a cadence she feels in her bones.

*

The last time they did this, Clarke was acutely conscious of the time slipping away. She knows that they probably only have this night, but it seems like to much more time, in comparison, that she can’t stop herself from relaxing into the mattress, Lexa curled up and watchful next to her.

When she wakes, the sun has set and there are lit candles dotted over the tent. Lexa is dressed in a rough vest and trousers, moving around the tent in quiet, aimless patterns; touching the tops of the chairs in the corner, fiddling with the dishes set out on the small table.

“Lexa.” Lexa turns toward her as she sits up, and her eyes flicker before she smiles; small, nervous, not _Heda_ -like at all.

“You slept a while,” she says, and Clarke stands up to find her clothes. She doesn’t miss the little gulp Lexa gives at the motion, or the way her eyes track her while she roots her shirt out.

“I was tired,” she says, and Lexa looks spooked as she approaches, hands clasping behind her back in that way she does when she’s worried. “I got a little sick.”

Lexa frowns. “The virus? You should have been immune.” Clarke shrugs.

“Not completely. Unlucky, I guess.” She wants to go up to Lexa and kiss her, she wants to bracket her ribs with her hands and feel her heart beat under her hands. She _wants_ , but Lexa is standing just slightly away, and her hands are still clasped behind her back.

“We should talk,” she says.

*

Neither of them are hungry, and they settle on the edge of the bed, Clarke wrapped in a blanket that she pulled off the top and Lexa tense.

“I leave in two days,” Lexa says abruptly. “I have sent the Ambassadors out of Polis for the next month, but I will need to take your prisoners with me, and have a few more meetings with the local leaders.”

“What will you do with them?” Clarke asks. She should have asked before, but she got carried away.

“Hand them out,” Lexa says. “I hear that the murderers number around twenty. I will distribute them to each of the clans, and they won’t be able to reassemble for years, at the earliest. They won’t be killed,” Lexa says. “They have skills, I hope, or they will learn. They will do their penance and help to rebuild what they tried to break.” Lexa looks weary, a frown still pulling the corners of her mouth down, and Clarke takes a risk and reaches for her hand. Lexa doesn’t pull away and Clarke allows herself to enjoy it, the rough skin under hers, quiet strength that she can sense, even now.

“I love you,” Lexa says. “I love you, Clarke.” And the words shouldn’t come out with so much pain attached, like someone is dragging the words out of her with barbed hooks, but they do. “I love you, and I am Heda, and I have been thinking and thinking about how to make these two facts fit, and I cannot.”

“Heda must be alone,” Lexa says. “I never understood why Titus would make us repeat that, until Costia. I loved her with everything,” she says, “and she died. She died, and I ruled. I went to audiences and met ambassadors, while she was gone. What kind of person can do that? She died, and I won wars. I built an empire. What kind of human does that make me?”

It takes Clarke a second to find her voice. “It makes you strong,” she says. “It makes you a survivor,” she says. “It makes you the kind of person that goes on. It makes you the person I love,” she says. “If I died -” and Lexa shakes her head, back bowing as if to protect a weak spot - “no, listen, I would want you to go on. I wouldn’t want you to waste away. _Kikon ste enti_ ,” Clarke says.

For a second she thinks that Lexa will cry out loud, but she only looks at the ceiling of the tent, chin trembling minutely. When she looks at Clarke again, she is steady, vulnerability across her features so stark that Clarke wants to look away. It’s too much, the trust, the offering up.

She wonders how many years it will be before they get this right.

“I want to come back to Polis with you,” she says. Polis, and the Tower, and that blood soaked room… but Lexa will be there, alive and smiling and smelling faintly of beeswax and the crushed herbs that the servants leave in her room.

Polis, with Lexa. The ground is nothing like she thought it would be.

“Yes,” Lexa says and she’s beautiful like this, hope blooming under her features, quiet, but there.

*

The morning comes quick, light stealing in through the small gaps in the tent, and Clarke turns her head away, into the pillow.

“Wake up, Clarke,” Lexa says, hand warm against her shoulder.

“No,” Clarke mumbles. But Lexa only laughs. It’s enough to get her to crack an eye open.

Lexa’s arm snakes around her and presses into the sensitive spot on her ribs, and she squirms away. Lexa moves closer, and kisses her shoulder.

“Please wake up,” she says.

“Not fair,” Clarke says, eyes opening despite themselves. Lexa only smiles, smug.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she says, and leans against the pillows, careless apart from the slit of her eyes as she watches Clarke, and the twitch of fingertips against her hip.

Clarke leans forward to lean her weight against her, and bends her head forward to kiss, and Lexa relaxes under her, meeting her with a tiny sigh that she will probably deny ever making.

She can feel Lexa pushing up, about to try to flip them, and she puts a hand on her chest.

“Wait,” she says, and Lexa pauses, a quizzical expression on her face.

Lexa is patient, still, and allows Clarke to roll her shirt up

She presses a hand against the scar, and Lexa shifts, but says nothing. It’s healing well, and it will fade, but never truly disappear. She takes a moment to breathe that in, to try to wash away the lingering fear that’s followed her all the way from Polis.

When she lifts her head, Lexa is watching her, solemn and quiet, hand in her hair steady.

She’ll remember this moment, she thinks, when Lexa is away or she’s returned to Arkadia.

“Habit,” she says, and the look that Lexa gives her is too understanding even for this soft moment.

“We should get up,” she says, and presses a long kiss into the skin above the scar.

*

Clarke gets to Arkadia first, taken by a few warriors who shadow her closely on the short ride back. No one speaks, but she can feel their eyes on her back.

Lexa will be following her in a few hours, but Clarke is going to do her best to make sure that the Arkadians don’t protest too much. Hopefully her mom and Kane will have talked to everyone.

The gate takes a while to open, and in the end Clarke has to ask the warriors to back away to the treeline.

“I’m here,” she says. “You’ve done your duty.”

They don’t want to leave, she can see, but they ride off anyway, slowly as if they’re hoping she’ll call them back.

As soon as they get to the treeline the gate creaks open. A skinny kid stands in the narrow opening, gun held carefully against his chest. He tilts his head down to get the sun out of his eyes.

“Come on,” he shouts across the space, and Clarke nudges her horse forward.

*

Pike and his crew look different when they’re cuffed together, kneeling on the ground, and if Clarke were a better person then the twinge of pleasure probably wouldn’t be there.

But if Clarke were a better person, she’d probably be dead.

Her mother shifts impatiently next to her. Being a part of the Coalition means a lot of speeches, apparently, and they’ve been standing to the side while Kane, Lexa, and a few of her generals dance around why they’re all here in the first place.

They’re in the recreation room - a long hall that the Ark had used as a kind of all-purpose room centre - a cramped space that did its best to keep give everyone a break from the tedium of Ark life. Clarke had come here for art and dance lessons when she was little, and she has a vague recollection of her class coming here for some kind of musical.

The electrical system on the far end of the room was damaged when the Ark fell, and it creates an eerie shift from artificial fluorescent lighting to almost pitch dark on the far end. There are cracks on the wall that indicate structural damage.

It’s the only place where they’ll all fit; Pike and his followers, Lexa and her protectors, bristling at the crowd, and the few people who had gotten themselves into the room: Clarke, a few former-high ranking members of the Ark, and Lincoln, recently released from prison, thinner than the last time she saw him.

“As you are part of the Coalition,” Lexa says, “The final decision on your punishment rests with me.” She’s in full Commander regalia, eyes painted dark, the crushed velvet cape trailing behind her with each deliberate step forward. One hand rests lightly on the handle of the throwing knife strapped to her hip.

It’s a deliberate show, and it’s working. The Arkers watch her like she’s a foreign object, an unquantifiable creature. Clarke stands still, and catches Lexa’s eye when she can.

“Blood must not have blood is the way of my people,” she says. “But we must find new ways to live if we are going to survive,” she says.

“I will take each person who was involved in the murder of my warriors,” she says. “They will pay for the lives they took. They will not be permitted to return here until I allow it.”

Kane and Abby had told everyone already, but there is still a ripple of anger from the Arkers in the room, and Lexa’s warriors edge forward, just a little. Lexa continues as if she hasn’t noticed.

“I will take them with me now,” Lexa says. Pike spits on the floor.

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” he says, and shakes his head. “You think you can change who we are by separating us. You can’t make us like _you_.”

Lexa steps forward, and her warriors follow suit.

“My decision is final,” she says. “ _Teik emo op_.” None of the Arkers stop Lexa’s warriors as they pull the prisoners up by their arms. Clarke avoids looking at Bellamy as they are forced to their feet.

“You’re a savage,” Pike says, before one of the warriors hits him in the ribs with the butt of his spear.

“Yes,” Lexa says. “You will be one, also. And you will live.”

*

“You’re going,” Abby says. Clarke’s already packed the things she wants to carry into a bag she has slung over her shoulder, and her gun is secure on her hip, but she doesn’t snark a reply.

“I’ll miss you,” she goes for, instead, and is surprised to realise that she means it a little. Her mother must realise it too, because she pulls Clarke into a hug, holding on tight.

“I love you, Clarke,” her mother says. “Come and see us whenever you can.”

“I will,” she says.

*

Octavia is waiting at the gate when she steps out.

“Lincoln’s gone ahead,” she says. “I think Lexa wanted to ask him about the Ark defenses.”

“Raven?” Octavia shrugs, and they wind their way back into Arkadia, to the out of the way room that Raven likes to hide in.

“Didn’t think you guys were coming,” Raven says.

“Not for long,” Clarke says. “We’re leaving, now. I just wanted to… if you ever wanted to come to Polis,” she says. “I would like if you did.”

“Unlikely,” Raven says. “Thanks, Griffin,” she says.

She leaves to let Octavia say goodbye. She’s missed a lot, these past few months.

*

Pike and his people are still being loaded up into a makeshift holding cell: a wagon with of planks roughly-hewn wood hammered into the bottom and sides, with enough space to serve as a short term solution.

Lexa turns when she approaches, and the corner of her mouth lifts for a second.

“Ambassador,” she says. “Welcome.”

“Not officially,” Clarke reminds her.

“It’s good to see you,” Lexa says.

*

Clarke gets her own horse, a light brown one that walks quietly along with the others. Animals in general still make her a little nervous, but this one let her stroke its mane while they were getting ready to leave.

She’s about in the middle of the group, Lexa in the front and Lincoln and Octavia somewhere in the back, and it’s all very… slow.

The group makes their way through the wilderness with an almost glacial pace. Lexa stops at every small village to visit with the people, and there are multiple stops along the way so that the scouts can ride ahead and give the all-clear.

It’s noisy, too, the constant sound of conversation cutting through the peace that Clarke usually associates with the forest, and by the third night, her nerves are jangling.

She keeps away from people, waving away Octavia and Lincoln’s invitation to eat with them and settles in the fork of a tree just within sight of the camp. She can barely hear the sounds of people from here. Her head tips back, cradled by the rough bark of the tree, and she closes her eyes.

“May I join you?” Lexa is standing in front of her, voice oddly hesitant considering that Clarke has spent every night in her tent since they left. Clarke scoots over until there is just enough space for Lexa to squeeze herself in, and she does, after taking a moment to glance around.

“It’s loud,” she says, and Lexa nods.

“I’m not used to - the forest doesn’t seem like it should be like this.”

“Before the Coalition,” Lexa says. “I would spend months on campaigns. It was terrible. I used to hope for the battle so start so that we could end it and go home.

Her body is wedged against Clarke’s, eyes soft as she talks about death, and the duality of it makes her heart pang. So she turns and kisses her, soft, lingering in a way that makes them both shiver.

When she pulls back, Lexa’s eyes are still closed. The silence stretches on for a little longer, but it’s comfortable.

“I have no idea what i’m going to do in Polis,” Clarke says after a little while, and Lexa’s eyes flicker open.

“Whatever you want,” Lexa says. “Anything.”

For a moment, all of the days they will have stretch out in front of her, unknowable, frightening. But beautiful, also.

Just for a moment, and then Clarke is back in the forest with Lexa, and she can’t keep from smiling.

“What I want right now,” she says, “is food.” Lexa laughs, low and melodious.

“Of course,” she says and they walk toward the camp, hand in hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's it (kind of). Please let me know what you think.
> 
> I turned this into a series because I wanted to do a little two-chapter fic from Lexa's POV. Click through to the next work to read the first chapter.
> 
> Trigedasleng translations  
> Kikon ste enti - the living are hungry  
> Teik emo op - take them

**Author's Note:**

> Trigedasleng translations:
> 
> Natrona - traitor
> 
> No frag em op - don’t kill him
> 
> Jus drein no jus draun - blood must not have blood
> 
> No mou. Beja - No more. Please
> 
> Ogud - it’s okay/all good
> 
> Reshop - Sleep well


End file.
